My Basic Ramblings: If I have learned one thing from movies, it's that ships are bad. They can be hit by an iceberg and sink (Titanic), get hit and flip over (The Poseidon Adventure), be filled with sweaty slaves rowing rowing rowing 'til they die (Ben-Hur) be invaded by an evil octopus thingy (Deep Rising, if I saw the commercials correctly), be blown up and run into a pier and be inhabited by Jason Patric (Speed 2, if I saw the commercials correctly), or be run by a real jerk of a captain, like this movie.
Clark Gable, of Gone With The Wind fame, is Fletcher Christian. (Toyed with the idea of naming a first child "Fletcher" - while it sounds okay with "Fitzgerald", it doesn't work with "Freemesser" so ain't gonna happen.) Whenever anyone in the movie said "Mr. Christian", I always thought of "Sister Christian", that song by Night Ranger. (At some point I will see Boogie Nights.) I read that Gable didn't want to shave off his trademark mustache for the role, but he had to since sailors weren't allowed to have facial hair. I think he looks better without it, but I have only one time in my life liked a guy with facial hair and that turned out to be the dictionary definition of "disaster".
Anyway, Christian is second in command of a ship, the Bounty, heading to Tahiti to pick up breadfruits for slaves in the Indes, or someplace. Anyway, the crew members don't wanna be there; they're plucked out of a pub. One guy keeps talking about his wife and baby, so you know he's gonna die by the end. They all live on this little tiny ship under the happy, insane eye of Captain Bligh, who displays his insanity before the boat's left harbor by handing out punishment to a guy who's already dead. (At that point I would casually jump off the ship and hide.)
So they travel and life's rough and Bligh's a dickhead and people die and they get to Tahiti, where everything's cool and loverly and the chief is an old white guy from England who'd sailed on a previous ship. Why the Tahitians pick an old white guy from England to be their chief, I dunno, but if it works, it works. Christian and this other guy whose name I keep forgetting, the one who's creating the Tahitian/English dictionary, meet local chicks and fall in love. They leave Tahiti, Bligh's still a dickhead, people die, Christian gets fed up and leads a mutiny. (Nevermind the fact that the slaves're gonna need the breadfruit to eat.)
I suppose there's sort of a siren's call to being the captain of a boat. You're the boss. You're the head honcho. Everyone has to do what you say with no questions asked. I could see abusing that power reeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeal easy. Someone pisses me off, they get keel-hauled.
(Keel-hauling, for those've you who don't know, is when they drag you under the ship a few times. Not only are you under water, so breathing is a bit difficult, but there's all sorts of barnacles and dead fish and coral and crap stuck to the bottom of the boat which rips your skin off. Fun for the whole family.)
The movie has a really frickin' depressing ending. Christian spends the rest of his life living on a God-forsaken island in the middle of nowhere, no chance of leaving, ever. The crew of the Bounty is hanged for their role in the mutiny, Bligh gets off (relatively) scot-free. The guy whose name I keep forgetting gets his life spared and ends up on another ship; whereas, if this were made in Hollywood today, it would be run by Bligh or Bligh's twin brother or something like that and it would be either a "Here we go again!" ending (leaving room for "Mutiny on the BountyII: Adventures in Paradise") or a "Twilight Zone I'm Stuck In Hell" ending.