--- title: "Mutiny on the Bounty" year: 1962 kind: "film" canonical: "https://film.one/film/mutiny-on-the-bounty-1962" fi1m_score: 56 critics_score: 45 critics_reviews: 4 published: "2026-09-20T04:05:21.343980+00:00" updated: "2026-09-20T04:05:21.521008+00:00" region: "US" licence: "© Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL." --- # Mutiny on the Bounty (1962) Directed by Lewis Milestone · 3h 05m · MPA NR · Adventure, Drama, History **Fi1m score: 56** · Critics 45 (early) from 4 reviews *In a sentence:* Three hours at sea, and the only man aboard who knows where he is going is the villain > Trevor Howard’s Bligh is a small, exact, frightening man and the ship around him is a real one; Marlon Brando’s Fletcher Christian is an idea that never becomes a person. At 185 minutes, it is a fine hour of seafaring inside a long afternoon. ## Synopsis Portsmouth, 1787. HMS Bounty sails for Tahiti under Captain William Bligh (Trevor Howard) to collect a thousand breadfruit plants, meant as cheap food for slaves in the West Indies. His second-in-command, Fletcher Christian (Marlon Brando), arrives at the quay late, in a carriage and in company, and treats the voyage as an inconvenience. Bligh treats it as a race. He drives the crew hard, has two cheeses sent ashore and Seaman John Mills (Richard Harris) flogged for saying where they went, and tries to force a passage round Cape Horn in the teeth of the weather before turning back to go the long way round Africa. Also aboard are the botanist William Brown (Richard Haydn), John Fryer (Eddie Byrne) and Alexander Smith (Hugh Griffith). Tahiti, when they reach it, has Maimiti (Tarita) waiting. ## Review Lewis Milestone directs Charles Lederer’s screenplay from the Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall novel, and the result runs 185 minutes, which is long enough to sail to Tahiti and in places feels like it. The story has not changed: Bligh (Trevor Howard) drives HMS Bounty and her men too hard on the way out, the men find paradise, and the way back is where it breaks. What is new is the notion of Fletcher Christian (Marlon Brando) as a bored gentleman who has to be dragged into caring. It is a fair notion. The film has one great performance, one strange one and one fine ship, and it needed a firmer hand on the cutting bench than it got. Howard is the great performance. His Bligh is small, exact and resentful, a man who knows the crew and the officers look down on him and has decided to earn it. He does not bellow. When two cheeses go missing and John Mills (Richard Harris) says out loud where they went, Bligh has him flogged for insolence, and Howard watches the lash the way a clerk watches a column of figures. We were frightened of him, more than we expected to be in a film with this much sunshine, because he never once seems to be enjoying it. Brando is the strange one. He plays Christian with a clipped, nasal, upper-class English drawl, a handkerchief and a habit of sniffing at everything as if it were slightly off. Moss Mabry dresses him in ruffles and silk, and for the first hour it works as comedy: a fop on a working ship, wrinkling his nose at the salt pork while the yards are being reefed. The trouble is that Brando holds the note for two hours. Christian is supposed to be a man who changes, and when the change comes it registers as a change of clothes. The scenes in which he is meant to be angry have the same temperature as the scenes in which he is meant to be bored. The ship is the reason to watch. Robert L. Surtees shoots her wide, with the whole vessel in frame from bowsprit to mizzen, and the men on the yards look the size they are. The attempt on Cape Horn is the best stretch: green water coming over the bow, men lashed to the wheel, the deck tilting until we lost our sense of which way was down. Bronislau Kaper scores it with heavy brass and lets the wind and canvas do the rest. We sat forward through all of it. The arrival at Tahiti, with what looks like the whole island coming out in canoes, is nearly as good, and Kaper’s drums and chorus give it a size the rest of the film keeps reaching for. The rest is the problem, and the problem is length. Lederer gives every scene a speech, and John McSweeney Jr. lets every speech finish. The Tahiti section is an hour of soft light and flowers in which nothing much happens except that Christian meets Maimiti (Tarita), who is lovely and given almost nothing to say. Harris starts raw and promising and then largely disappears into the crew. Hugh Griffith’s Smith is the comic drunk and does it well, but the film goes back to him one time too many. What comes after the mutiny we will not describe, except to say that the last forty minutes are talk, and by then we were restless and then irritable about being restless. Milestone made [*All Quiet on the Western Front*](https://film.one/film/all-quiet-on-the-western-front) in 1930, a film about men and the officers who spend them that wastes nothing. This one wastes a good deal. Against the 1935 version, it has the better Bligh, the better ship and the weaker Christian, and it is an hour longer. Most critics have been harder on it than we are, and the objection is nearly always Brando; we think Howard and Surtees buy the film more goodwill than the consensus allows, though not a great deal more. See it for the Horn and for Howard, and see it on the largest screen you can find, because Surtees composed it for one. At home the sea shrinks and the speeches grow, which is the wrong way round for this film. *Fi1m score 56, published 20 September 2026.* ### Reviews we read (4) - **Variety**, Variety Staff (70/100, inferred): The film emerges as a physically superlative entertainment that is often overwhelmingly spectacular, though short of genuine dramatic greatness. It is generally superior to the 1935 version, with terrific scenes of action and strong performances from the cast. [Read](https://variety.com/1961/film/reviews/mutiny-on-the-bounty-3-1200420133/) - **The New York Times**, Bosley Crowther (50/100, inferred): The sheer magnitude and energy of the sea adventure render it a highmark of filmed adventure, but Brando's eccentric portrayal of Christian dominates and unbalances the drama, with direction credit shared unclearly between Reed and Milestone. [Read](https://www.nytimes.com/1962/11/09/archives/screen-new-version-of-mutiny-on-bounty-seen-at-loews-statecaptain.html) - **Empire**, Will Lawrence (30/100, inferred): The critic calls the film a stiff, dramatically barren three-hour opus that is visually attractive but colourless overall. They single out Marlon Brando’s foppish performance and nasal accent for particular criticism, noting his excessive creative control turned the film into a vanity project that sank under its budget. [Read](https://www.empireonline.com/movies/reviews/mutiny-bounty-review/) - **The New Yorker**, Brendan Gill (30/100, inferred): The film is a gaudy bauble of enormous size and negligible value that only children will sit through uncomplaining. The direction and screenplay are competent but fail to achieve genuine success, hampered by Brando's eccentric performance as Fletcher Christian. [Read](https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1962/11/17/mavericks) ## Details - **Director:** Lewis Milestone - **Director:** Lewis Milestone - **Screenplay:** Charles Lederer - **Novel:** Charles Nordhoff, James Norman Hall - **Cinematography:** Robert L. Surtees - **Editor:** John McSweeney Jr. - **Music:** Bronislau Kaper - **Costume design:** Moss Mabry - **Producer:** Aaron Rosenberg - **Cast:** Marlon Brando as First Lieutnant Fletcher Christian; Trevor Howard as Capt. William Bligh; Richard Harris as Seaman John Mills; Hugh Griffith as Alexander Smith; Richard Haydn as William Brown; Percy Herbert as Matthew Quintal; Gordon Jackson as Seaman Edward Birkett; Chips Rafferty as Michael Byrne - **Runtime:** 3h 05m - **Certificate (MPA):** NR - **Release (the US):** 8 November 1962 - **Genres:** Adventure, Drama, History - **Budget:** $19 million - **Box office:** $14 million - **Trailer:** https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ur25pXcI52o ## Where to watch in the US - Tubi: free, hd - Amazon Prime Video: rent $2.99, hd - Amazon Prime Video: buy $9.99, hd *Checked 2026-09-20.* Also available in: AT, AU, BE, CA, CL, DK, ES, FI, FR, GB, IE, IT, MX, NL, NO, NZ, RO, SE, US. Add `?region=XX` to this URL for another country. ## Awards - Academy Awards 1963: Best Art Direction, Color (nominated); Best Cinematography, Color (nominated); Best Film Editing (nominated); Best Original Score (nominated); Best Picture (nominated); Best Special Effects (nominated) ## If you liked this - *The Bounty* (1984): The same voyage told in half the time, with a Bligh you can almost pity. - *Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World* (2003), Fi1m 86: A wooden ship as a working place, and officers who earn their authority. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/master-and-commander-the-far-side-of-the-world.md) - *Billy Budd* (1962): Melville’s innocent seaman and a captain who knows the law is wrong. - *The Cruel Sea* (1953): Corvettes in the Atlantic; command as exhaustion rather than glamour. - *Das Boot* (1981), Fi1m 89: Men in a metal tube, and the sea doing most of the acting. — [Fi1m page](https://film.one/film/das-boot.md) --- © Fi1m Ltd. Written by AI under a human editor; checked against sources before publication. Quote with attribution and a link to the canonical URL. Canonical: https://film.one/film/mutiny-on-the-bounty-1962