I'll very gladly watch it again with you, if you like.
I'd love to. Now that I have transport, that'll be relatively easy to accomplish.
The thing about Mutiny on the Bounty, at least the Laughton/Gable version... there are at least two complex dramas that the movie first sets up, then discards. As in the book, the expedition gets to Tahiti (I think?) and spends a long time there before heading home. Leaving Tahiti provokes the title mutiny, in fact. Well, while on Tahiti, a lot of the nicer protagonists start relationships with (gorgeous, exotic-ified) Tahitian women. Fletcher Christian hooks up with the daughter of one of the local chieftains. Then they're forced to leave them, and the mutiny breaks loose.
Much later, the mutineers somehow-or-other stop back at Tahiti, talk their girlfriends into fleeing with them aboard the stolen ship, and they sail off to Pitcairn Island and wreck the ship so they can't go back. Well, the problematical thing here... The girlfriends are pretty cool with that. Christian's girlfriend's dad is sad, but he's completely cool about letting her sail off into nowhere with a probable murderer, though she can never come home again, even if she changes her mind. (My mother watched it to that point and said, "In real life, those girls' families would have been down on the beach, weeping and beating their breasts and scratching themselves with shells in grief, because they knew they'd never see the girls again." My mom has actually read the book. Maybe that happens in the book, I don't know.) Anyhow, the only people I really felt sorry for there were the girlfriends. It's as though no one involved in the film noticed that women were people and would have opinions about this. Anyhow, it was bad writing.
Similarly punch-pulling: the film ends back in England with a handful of the mutineers about to be executed in the morning. And we've spent the whole film with these guys, and know that they're basically decent men who were involved against their will; they had no other option. The protagonist gets off on a technicality, though, so that's OK. Then he receives an officer's commission and sails away aboard another ship with "Rule, Britannia" playing on the soundtrack, as far as I can tell, non-ironically. We're actually supposed to have a warm fuzzy feeling about this. We go straight from the pale staring faces in the condemned cell to the protagonist trotting off to his bright new future. It was just revolting.
Mind you, if the rest of the movie had stunk, I wouldn't have minded those things in particular. The movie was good enough at other points for me to feel betrayed when it came out with hamhanded stuff like that transition from the condemned cell.
no subject
I'd love to. Now that I have transport, that'll be relatively easy to accomplish.
The thing about Mutiny on the Bounty, at least the Laughton/Gable version... there are at least two complex dramas that the movie first sets up, then discards. As in the book, the expedition gets to Tahiti (I think?) and spends a long time there before heading home. Leaving Tahiti provokes the title mutiny, in fact. Well, while on Tahiti, a lot of the nicer protagonists start relationships with (gorgeous, exotic-ified) Tahitian women. Fletcher Christian hooks up with the daughter of one of the local chieftains. Then they're forced to leave them, and the mutiny breaks loose.
Much later, the mutineers somehow-or-other stop back at Tahiti, talk their girlfriends into fleeing with them aboard the stolen ship, and they sail off to Pitcairn Island and wreck the ship so they can't go back. Well, the problematical thing here... The girlfriends are pretty cool with that. Christian's girlfriend's dad is sad, but he's completely cool about letting her sail off into nowhere with a probable murderer, though she can never come home again, even if she changes her mind. (My mother watched it to that point and said, "In real life, those girls' families would have been down on the beach, weeping and beating their breasts and scratching themselves with shells in grief, because they knew they'd never see the girls again." My mom has actually read the book. Maybe that happens in the book, I don't know.) Anyhow, the only people I really felt sorry for there were the girlfriends. It's as though no one involved in the film noticed that women were people and would have opinions about this. Anyhow, it was bad writing.
Similarly punch-pulling: the film ends back in England with a handful of the mutineers about to be executed in the morning. And we've spent the whole film with these guys, and know that they're basically decent men who were involved against their will; they had no other option. The protagonist gets off on a technicality, though, so that's OK. Then he receives an officer's commission and sails away aboard another ship with "Rule, Britannia" playing on the soundtrack, as far as I can tell, non-ironically. We're actually supposed to have a warm fuzzy feeling about this. We go straight from the pale staring faces in the condemned cell to the protagonist trotting off to his bright new future. It was just revolting.
Mind you, if the rest of the movie had stunk, I wouldn't have minded those things in particular. The movie was good enough at other points for me to feel betrayed when it came out with hamhanded stuff like that transition from the condemned cell.