Word: bligh
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...matter of balance, and if they keep trying they are going to get it right one of these decades. In 1935 Mutiny on the Bounty unquestionably belonged to Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh. The perverse joy that grand actor took in his character's sadism entirely dominated Clark Gable's conventionally heroic Fletcher Christian. In 1962, when Marlon Brando came on board for a star trip, his Mr. Christian took the helm, dramatically speaking, long before his character, leading the mutineers, had seized it. Though Brando was chastised by critics for his excesses, there was something brave...
...problem is not with the actors. Anthony Hopkins plays Bligh with neurotically coiled intensity, while in the only strong scene he has, Mel Gibson, as Mr. Christian, shows himself capable of expressing with anguished force the conflict between duty and decency that has been tearing at him. The trouble stems from the crude truncation of a script that began many years ago as blueprint for a two-part David Lean epic. Originally the idea must have been to free the story of its mythical and melodramatic encrustations and get at something like the historical truth. The finished film offers fragmentary...
...this psychological line is inconsistently and unpersuasively developed. As a half-revised character, Bligh is emotionally becalming to the audience; it is hard to know whether to root for or against him, for or against Christian, who is mostly seen hanging about, looking puzzled...
...recalls fretting for months about why he was risking his life. "I invented all sorts of answers, but none of them was honest." The truth dawned in midocean, as he was listening to a radio interview with a man who, as he remembers, had resailed the route Captain Bligh followed after he was cast adrift from the Bounty by mutineers. "He had come up with all these reasons, to prove Bligh's logs were right, to prove Bligh was a good sailor, but none of it sounded right. It didn't fit. I thought...
This larkish, disarming tone remains at odds with the object itself. Harrison reveals that he got the notion of collecting his jottings and memories when "two drunkards cornered me in a hotel room near Heathrow Airport" and pressed on him a copy of Captain William Bligh's Log of H. M.S. Bounty, put out by a firm in Surrey called Genesis. This, and a televi sion program on the making of fine books, gave George the idea of "having these trivial bits of paper dignified in this...