Mutiny on the Bounty

Marlon Brando - Fletcher Christian
Trevor Howard - Capt. William Bligh
Richard Harris - John Mills
Hugh Griffith - Alexander Smith
Richard Haydn - William Brown
Tarita - Maimiti
Percy Herbert - Matthew Quintal
Duncan Lamont - John Williams
Chips Rafferty - Michael Byrne
Noel Purcell - William McCoy

It is inconceivable that Carol Reed could have done much more with the MGM remake of Mutiny on the Bounty than anyone else. The project could not have been more jinxed if a school of albatrosses had alighted on Marlon Brando's contract in January 1960, when he signed to do the picture. Reed's first meeting with the star in California ought to have been an ill omen of the first order. Brando, then one of the top box office attractions in Hollywood and an indispensable component of the picture, spent two hours trying to convince Reed and the producer, Aaron Rosenberg, to scrap the whole idea of doing Mutiny, and develop a movie about Caryl Chessman, a recently executed rapist, instead. Reed also had good reason to feel optimistic, even though he was commencing a mammoth production that was far removed from the tight, controlled, personal dramas with which he was most comfortable. Of the two leading roles in the movie after Brando’s, one had gone to an exciting young Irish actor, Richard Harris, and the other to Trevor Howard, with whom Reed had, of course, enjoyed an immensely fruitful and harmonious relationship on previous films. In addition, the script was being written by Eric Ambler, a specialist in the type of entertainment Reed understood best.

But a hale of calamities struck in swift order. A full-scale replica of the Bounty constructed in Nova Scotia at a cost of $750,0000, encountered various delays - one nearly fatal - on its passage to Tahiti, where the bulk of the movie was to be shot. Production was scheduled to begin 15 October, but it was 4 December before the ship finally groaned into port. Other disasters included three deaths among the film's personnel, the abrupt departure of a key Tahitian actress midway through filming, and the onset of the devastating Tahitian rainy season.

The movie's biggest catastrophes were man-made, however the costly and demoralising eruptions of Brando's ego. Dissatisfied with Ambler's screenplay, he insisted that the concluding episode on Pitcairn Island be shot so as to incorporate his ideas about 'man's inhumanity to man'. Before shooting was completed, five more writers would arrive and depart in the attempt to create a script that had the philosophical thrust Brando envisioned. When he did not get what he wanted, he subjected his co-workers to displays of petulance and self-indulgence that slowed the rate of production to a crawl and sent the film millions of dollars over budget. Meanwhile, he lived in splendour in a Tahitian villa and sampled the local nightlife extensively. Tempers boiled over on the set, as actors found it impossible to work with Brando and stalked off the set.

There is no explicit record of Reed's reaction to all this, but, as Korda says, it is not hard to imagine the despair of a 'gentle soul' (and, one might add, a disciplined professional) at being confronted by so much stormy chaos. 'I think he quit at the point when he was literally waist deep in water waiting for the script to be sent to him by telegram from whoever was writing it at that point', says Birkin. Actually, he seems to have resigned rather less dramatically; back in Hollywood where the entire cast and crew retreated for several weeks until the weather in Tahiti improved. Lewis Milestone, a rigorous, no-nonsense veteran who collided with Brando head-on, causing even more friction, expense and collective trauma, replaced Reed. When the $27 million fiasco was finally launched, in the autumn of 1962, it was a critical and commercial failure and had the gloomy side effect of ending Milestone's career.