Mutiny on the Bounty (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) exhibits more strikingly than any previous cinema in which he has appeared the peculiar capacity of Actor Charles Laughton to seem created by providential dispensation in the identical likeness of whomever he undertakes to impersonate. Actor Laughton is currently in London preparing to appear in an English version of Cyrano de Bergerac. To perfect his understanding of the play, he learned it by heart in French and had up to last week written out twelve copies by memory. Before making Mutiny on the Bounty he went to London, said to Gieves, Bond Street tailors: "I wish to inquire about some uniforms you made some time ago for Captain William Bligh." Said the clerk: "Yes sir, and about what was the date, sir?'' Said Actor Laughton: "1789." Gieves promptly produced the exact specifications of the uniforms worn by Captain Bligh, had a complete set copied for Actor Laughton to wear in the picture.
Preliminaries like these do not, in Actor Laughton's case, illustrate that eccentric vanity which distinguishes so many of his confreres. They are superficial but valid symbols of his extraordinary devotion to the task at hand, a devotion amounting to an obsession and one which, in a curious way, has had an important secondary effect upon his work in this picture. The character of Captain Bligh, as presented to posterity by Charles Nordhoff & James Norman Hall, was remarkable for combining, with the peevish, effeminate cruelty which caused the Bounty's crew to set him adrift in an open boat in mid-Pacific, that cool, incredible heroism which enabled the boat, propelled as much by the force of Bligh's indomitable determination as by wind or oars, to reach the Dutch island of Timor, across 3,600 miles of open sea. In Mutiny on the Bounty, the magnificence of Laughton's work rests largely in the way he resolves these strangely complementary forces motivating its central character. Bligh aboard the Bounty, a pasty-faced, sharp-tongued, miserly sadist, is a splendid portrait. It is, however, only a preface to Bligh after the mutiny. Bligh on duty and in action, cursing his loyal sailors from the stern of the open boat, riding the tiller in mountainous seas, slitting the neck of a seabird for a sick sailor and finally, as the gulls rise out of the sea mist, croaking through dried lips the one word, "Timor."