Blu-Ray Review: GUYS AND DOLLS

GUYS AND DOLLS
Written and Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
Starring Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Jean Simmons and Vivien Blaine

GUYS AND DOLLS is one of those classical Hollywood musicals where people don’t simply walk down the street but rather do so with a pronounced bounce in their step and an exaggerated smile on their face. It requires a certain suspension of disbelief to be even remotely believed and fewer people today have the attention span to do this. For those who do delight in this enchanting style though, Warner Bros. has released a collector’s edition that will surely get them bouncing and smiling in their living rooms.

Based on the Frank Loesser Broadway show, GUYS AND DOLLS was adapted for the screen in 1955 and despite the show’s immense success, the film itself was a bit of a risk. Writer/Director, Joseph L. Mankiewicz had won four Oscars in two years before taking this project on, but he had never directed a musical. And then there is the talent. Marlon Brando was the top box office draw of the day, but he was most certainly an unproven singer. Meanwhile, Frank Sinatra, one of the most notable voices of the century, was passed over for the main role in favor of Brando and was said to have been unhappy in the role he ended up with. Despite all the potential for disaster though, GUYS AND DOLLS not only pulls it off but is a genuine classic.

Brando and Sinatra behind the scenes

The new Blu-ray edition both looks and sounds infinitely better than its previous DVD edition. While the construction of the menus is a little stiff (No “play all” option on the musical numbers? Really?), it is presented in a brilliant digibook, which highlights all of the actors’ and the film’s rich backstory. Said story is reiterated in the numerous short documentaries about the production too. It may be a movie about big gambles and large losses but GUYS AND DOLLS is a sure bet!

On The Waterfront

On The Waterfront, 1954
Directed by Elia Kazan
Nominated for 12 Oscars, Won 8
Up Against: The Caine Mutiny, The Country Girl, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, Three Coins in the Fountain

Terry Malloy used to be a prize fighter, but now he raises pigeons and works on the docks, running errands for the corrupt union boss, Johnny Friendly. One of the errands Terry has to run is telling a man named Joey that he found one of his missing pigeons and that he's put it on the roof for him to come and get, Terry knowing there will be men up there waiting for him to accost him. What he didn't know was that they were going to toss him from the roof of the building, killing him. Terry immediatly feels guilty, and that guilt builds when he starts falling in love with Joey's sister, Edie, while she tries to find out who killed her brother. While the two start falling in love, Terry realizes who much better life can be, and it's not the horrible place with all indecent people he's thought it has been. When Johnny Friendly continues to kill people, and Father Barry, a local priest, challenged by Edie that she "never heard of a saint hiding in a church", and to go out there and see what's going on, tries to find information on who killed Joey. Terry starts realizing he needs to tell the truth, and he needs to bring down Johnny Friendly in the process. 

This movie came highly recommended to me by my boyfriends father. While he's more of a literature man instead of a movie man, I thought I'd take his recommendation seriously since he also spoke extremely highly of Annie Hall. So I put a hold on it at the library (subsequently it had a lot of other holds and it's taken me months to get it). But I popped the movie in just a day after getting it, and found myself enthralled by the story and by Marlon Brando. 

What, I thought, could've easily been a pretty 2D character, Brando turned it into a subtle performance, where we can clearly see Terry start to become more and more guilty and slowly realizing his philosophy of life isn't actually true. Brando was classy, with just enough tough guy to balance it out, that you knew he didn't realize believe what he said he did, and wasn't the bad guy that Edi'e father made him out to be. He was searching for something more, and Edie showed him what it was. 

The movie was well-told, and had many chilling and heartbreaking moments, including when Father Barry is praying over Kayo Dugan's body, and then starts to talk to the dozens of men around him about honesty, and cruxification, and some of the men start throwing food at him. And when Terry, beaten to a pulp, gets up and walks through all the men to enter the docks, after they declare they will only work if Terry is given work. 

The film had just enough amount of romance (doesn't Edie look like a mix of Jessica Chastain and Mia Wasikowski? Or at least I thought so, it was pretty uncanny) without making it too mushy. And had the right amount of action/crime in it. 

Overall, I thought this film was really well done; well acted, well directed, well written. It really deserves all the wins it received (including Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Writing, Editing and Art Direction), and deserves to be revered as a classic. Yes, I really enjoyed this film. 

Acting- 9/10
Directing- 8.5/10
Screenplay- 8/10
Music - 8/10
"The look"- 8.5 /10
Entertaining- 9/10
Emotional Connection- 8.5/10
Rewatchability- 8/10
Did I like It?- 8.5/10
"Total Package"**- 8/10  

 Total: 84/100

The Men (1950)

***
Country: US
Director: Fred Zinnemann


Marlon Brando's performance as Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 film version of A Streetcar Named Desire made him a movie star. So closely identified is Brando with that character that many people believe it was his first screen appearance. But it wasn't. A Streetcar Named Desire was actually the second film he made. A year before making Streetcar, Brando starred in a modest film produced by Stanley Kramer and directed by Fred Zinnemann about the problems of a paraplegic ex-soldier, The Men.

Brando plays Bud Wilocek, a young man who was shot in the back by a sniper in the closing days of the Second World War and is now paralyzed from the waist down. He has been languishing in Veterans Hospitals for four years without making any significant physical or psychological adjustment to his disability. When we first see Bud he is having a nightmare, and it soon becomes clear that he is a depressed and bitter man. Dismayed at Bud's lack of progress, the physician in charge of his treatment, Dr. Brock (Everett Sloane), decides to move him from a private room to a ward in the hope that this will force him to socialize with other patients and bring him out of his lethargy and self-pity. The three other patients in his section of the ward find it difficult to relate to Bud's sullen attitude. One of them, though, a Latino named Angel Lopez, treats him with more patience than the others and manages to reach him. Eventually, following the upbeat Lopez's example of dedication to physical rehabilitation, Bud begins to emerge from his self-imposed isolation and at last to make both physical and psychological progress.

Matters become complicated when Bud's girl friend from before his injury, Ellen (Teresa Wright), seeks him out to try to resume their relationship. For four years he has refused to see her, viewing the future of any relationship as hopeless. But she persists and slowly succeeds in thawing him emotionally, to the point where he agrees to marry her. An hour into the movie, the Bud we now see is a quite different person from the man we met at the beginning. Ellen seems to have motivated him to make a real effort to adjust to his condition and adopt a more hopeful attitude toward the future. After being married in the chapel at the hospital, they go to their new house, the first time Bud has lived away from a hospital since his injury. But things do not go well that first day. Ellen suddenly gets cold feet, and when Bud senses her trepidation he reacts with anger and moves back to the hospital. With disappointment on both sides, it's questionable whether the young couple will ever get back together.

The Men is an early example of a kind of American film that really began with William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives—the postwar film that sought to place a personal story in the context of a social problem and to present that problem realistically and informatively. Before directing feature films, Zinnemann worked for years as a director of documentary shorts, and in The Men that background is evident right from the beginning, as Dr. Brock speaks to a group of women—mothers, wives, and fiancées—about the nature of paraplegia and its implications for personal relationships. "The word walk must be forgotten," he tells them bluntly. "It no longer exists." It's the kind of explanatory narrative passage Zinnemann had used in the first minutes of The Search (1948) to describe the process of dealing with displaced children after WW II and would use again in the opening of The Nun's Story (1959) to document the way novitiates train to become nuns.

Today we are familiar with films about the kinds of social and medical problems dealt with in The Men, but in its day it must have been seen as an example of a new kind of movie, one that treated such subjects with unaccustomed candor and seriousness. One thing that makes The Men so effective at this is the amount of realistic detail in the picture. Much of it was filmed on location at the Birmingham VA Hospital in Van Nuys, California, and several dozen actual patients of the paraplegic ward at the hospital appear in the film. Fred Zinnemann and the writer, Carl Foreman, did a great deal of research in preparation for the picture, and that attention to realism shows.

Marlon Brando did equally meticulous preparation for his role as Bud. For a month before filming began, Brando lived as a patient at Birmingham VA Hospital. For the first three weeks he was at the hospital, the other patients didn't know he was an actor. He lived as a paraplegic, experiencing and absorbing as much as he could. He even learned to use a wheelchair expertly, as you can tell when you see him rocketing down the hallway of the hospital and deftly maneuvering around obstacles or playing wheelchair basketball with real paraplegics. To say that Brando was researching his role seems too mild a way to describe the lengths he went to for authenticity.

Marlon Brando on the set of The Men

Brando is probably the film actor admired by fellow film actors above all others. Time and again I've heard actors say how affected they were by him and how he inspired them in their craft. They often say how real he seems on screen. Yet Brando has never struck me as a realistic actor. Despite the Method's fundamental tenet of actors reaching deep inside to find a connection between themselves and the character they're playing, I've generally found Brando the actor to be highly mannered. Sometimes this can be hugely effective, as with his flamboyant, sinister/comical Stanley Kowalski. One exception to the high level of artifice found in so many Brando performances is his Terry Malloy in On the Waterfront, which seems on the whole a very honest job of acting. His Bud in The Men is another performance I would call honest.

I suspect that Brando must have burned out on screen acting within a few years. Perhaps this is why his Bud in The Men seems so fresh. There's a very unaffected quality to Bud not found in most of the characters he played later. In those later performances, Brando sometimes strains so hard to locate the uniqueness of the character that he comes perilously close to caricature. In Bud, though, he creates a character who cannot be reduced to a set of mannerisms, a complex young man—and Brando does seem very young, at times almost boyish—who embodies the opposing qualities of anger and sensitivity. Brando makes us believe that these are not contradictory traits, but that they coexist innately in Bud. It's an impressively natural performance, one without the sense of contrivance of his later work. Brando's presence alone makes The Men worth watching, not just for its historical interest as his first appearance on screen, but also for the quality and openness of his acting.

Unfortunately, the rest of the cast is not always as consistent as Brando. In The Men we can witness a whole range of acting styles. As fellow patients, Richard Erdman and Jack Webb (yes, Sgt. Joe Friday himself) give controlled performances, as does Teresa Wright, who conveys with great subtlety the initial determination and later irresolution of Ellen. As Dr. Brock, though, Everett Sloane is prone to overacting and speechifying. Interestingly, in a scene late in the film between him and Brando, when Bud is venting his full anger to Dr. Brock, Sloane holds back to let Brando dominate the scene and in his restraint does his best acting in the film.

The non-professional actors in the film also show varying degrees of ability. Arthur Jurado, the real-life paraplegic who plays Angel (apparently he died not long after making the film) is quite affecting and natural. Some of the other non-professionals portraying patients, however, seem amateurishly overemphatic. This is especially obvious in a scene where a group of these men meet to determine how to deal with an instance of Bud's serious misbehavior. Besides the inconsistency of the acting, my chief complaint about the film is the heavy-handed music score by Dimitri Tiomkin. The low-key style of the film is not well served by Tiomkin's overbearing and seemingly incessant music.

If the idea of a movie about war injury no longer seems as novel as it must have in 1950, the subject itself is one that has just as much relevance today as it did then. In the film Bud received his injury in the closing days of the Second World War. But just a month before The Men was released, the Korean War began. Since then we have had Vietnam, the Gulf War of the early 90s, the Serbian conflict of the late 90s, and now Iraq/Afghanistan. If today the plight of soldiers suffering war injuries—both physical and psychological—has become a subject films tackle routinely, we can thank movies like The Men for making this so.

You might also like:

• Viva Zapata! (1952)

This post is part of the LAMB Acting School 101 on Marlon Brando. Click here for more posts on Brando.

Belated Birthday of Heath Ledger

April 4^th was Heath Ledger’s birthday.  He would have been 32.  This anniversary serves as a reminder of just how sad his passing was three years ago, and how many more great performances he had in store.  After he stared in the critically-acclaimed Brokeback Mountain, he was hailed as the next Marlon Brando.  Unfortunately, his story took a James Dean-esque twist instead.

I knew and understood the Brando comparison back in 2005, when I was still in high school.  It you watch any Brando film—On the Waterfront, A Streetcar Named Desire, The Fugitive Kind, etc.—you see how much he disappeared into a role, how much of his body he committed to the part.  In lieu of making dialog work for him, he made the space in between the lines marks of brilliance.  Brando never hid behind lines; rather he internalized them, making it appear his character would burst if the line wasn’t spoken.  Think of “Stelllllaaaaa!” think of the scene where he opens the bottle of champagne in Streetcar, think of him trying on Eva Marie Saint’s glove in Waterfront.  Brando discovered the small things within a role, and used them to define the part.  Ledger did this too.

Look no further than his two most honored performances, that of Ennis Del Mar in Brokeback Mountain and The Joker in The Dark Knight.  Rarely do you see a multiple Oscar nominee represented with two such vastly different roles.  But Ledger managed it.  Say what you want about his posthumous success with The Joker, but we all know he deserved the praise and would have won had he been alive.  Look at him in Brokeback.  Minimalism at its finest.  He mumbles through his lines like a man trying to find himself, simply lost.  He’s hiding from himself, so he hides what he says.  Each of his lines in that film is delivered with such a painful hint of self-loathing, and of fear, not of society, but of himself—of the truth.  The final scene where he cradles Jake Gyllenhaal’s bloody shirt is something of pure wonder; an actor so clearly understanding what the character is going though, and delivering on the demanding cathartic moment.  So much in the body, so much character study, so much devotion.

The same can be said for his instant-classic turn as The Joker.  Actors reinvent characters all the time, but never before had it been done to this magnitude.  Sparing some of the ad nauseum details about the role, it was perfect.  Like Brando, he took small things and made them powerful.  For instance, when another actor would have sat quietly in the jail cell, Ledger began applauding—something that wasn’t in the script—and suddenly that’s a memorable scene from the movie.  His slithery devouring of lines is nothing short of genius, even changing throwaway lines into unintended punchlines (“Very poor choice of words” anyone?)

I was already a huge fan of Ledger when he passed, and like most of America, probably more so after seeing The Dark Knight.  Seeing his performance acknowledged with an Academy Award win was my proudest moment as an Oscar fan.  It showed that sometimes, just sometimes, they do award the best performance of the year, regardless of genre.  

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Viva Zapata! (1952)

***
Country: US
Director: Elia Kazan

Viva Zapata! has all the earmarks of a studio prestige project. Marlon Brando's first movie after he created such a sensation in A Streetcar Named Desire, it was directed by his Streetcar director, Elia Kazan, during the heyday of Kazan's career and personally produced by the head of Twentieth Century-Fox, Darryl F. Zanuck. The screenplay was by the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer John Steinbeck, who would receive the Nobel Prize for Literature ten years later. The film received five Oscar nominations (winning one—Anthony Quinn for best supporting actor), including one for best actor for Brando, who did win best actor awards at the Cannes Film Festival and from the British Academy. Given the formidable talent involved and the praise the film has received (David Thomson calls it "impressive" and "original"), it's one that I've looked forward to seeing for many years and was finally able to when it premiered on TCM recently. (It won't be available on DVD until next month.) I have to say, though, that despite all the care obviously lavished on it, my reaction is that this is a work of mixed quality that does not fully live up to its reputation.

Marlon Brando as Zapata in his bizarre-looking makeup

Set during the Mexican Revolution of the early 20th century, the film deals with the role in those events of Emiliano Zapata, an illiterate peasant who became one of the heroes of that revolution, the gravity of this subject another indication of the seriousness with which this project was approached by all involved. Brando is very good indeed in the title part (although I have to ask myself, "What were they thinking when they put him in that absurd makeup?"). He plays Zapata very quietly, almost meekly in one of his most subtle, least affected performances. This is a man in conflict, yet Brando conveys that conflict less as externalized turmoil than as internalized confusion. Zapata is no zealot, but an uncomplicated man who, because others admire the way he speaks his mind and acts on the strength of his convictions, is called upon to become a leader. He does reluctantly accept that role, allowing circumstances to direct him into a course of action he does not feel naturally suited for. But unlike nearly everyone else in the film, his ideals are not subverted by the power he finds himself wielding, and he eventually forgoes that power because he cannot accept the inevitable necessity to compromise his principles. In the end, though, he finds that the simple people he loves will not allow him to remain in retirement and that he must sacrifice his own desires, and eventually his life, to give the people what they need. Like so many of Steinbeck's heroes, he becomes a martyr. Brando, however, manages to avoid the sanctimony and self-righteousness that are the pitfalls of such a contrivance, stoically accepting that he must put aside his own welfare for the common good.

As you might expect in a movie directed by Kazan, who himself started as a stage and film actor and worked as a stage director in the 1940s, there are other good performances in the film as well. After more than fifteen years playing forgettable parts, Mexican-born Anthony Quinn, playing Zapata's brother Eufemio, finally found his niche, one from which he rarely strayed for the rest of his long career. Interestingly, he had replaced Brando as Stanley Kowalski when the stage version of Streetcar went on tour, and many years later was one of several actors considered for Don Corleone in The Godfather before Brando, who was Francis Ford Coppola's first choice but whose reputation for being difficult and demanding made Paramount executives nervous, was finally cast. Quinn excels in his later scenes when he abandons his revolutionary ideals to self-interest and becomes a disillusioned, hedonistic wreck. Jean Peters, a Fox starlet of the early 1950s who later married Howard Hughes, is surprisingly understated and believable as Zapata's wife, Josefa, and has quite good chemistry with Brando.

There is also much to admire in Kazan's direction. He stages key scenes with great imagination and visual force: the scene in which Zapata and others gradually surround a group of mounted soldiers leading a prisoner by a rope tied around his neck and liberate him; a drily funny scene in which Zapata meets Josefa's merchant-class family and indulges in a game of one-upmanship, cleverly trading platitudes with them to prove he is worthy of their daughter; and two separate assassination scenes, including the one that acts as the finale of the film, staged almost ritualistically. The film also contains several action sequences, such as the one in which Zapata and his men blow up an Army train to steal guns and ammunition, that show what a great director of action pictures or Westerns Kazan could have been had such subjects appealed to him. Although shot largely in Texas (it's unclear whether this was by choice or because of opposition by the Mexican government to filming in Mexico), Kazan and Fox house cinematographer Joe MacDonald give the film the authentic look of the sere landscape of northern Mexico. I do think, though, that the use of color, which Fox permitted for less artistically ambitious projects than this one, would have improved the film. The decision to film in black-and-white was likely by design, since at the time there was a prejudice that monochrome was more appropriate for serious films and color more suited to frivolous ones.

With such obvious strengths, why then am I so ambivalent towards the film as a whole? I think almost everything in the movie I can find to criticize stems from Steinbeck's muddled, unfocused screenplay. For one thing, the film labors under the curse of American movies of the 1950s—the desire to make a Statement. Yet for all its aspiration to significance, Viva Zapata! is remarkably vague about what it wants to say. Its overriding message seems to have something to do with the simplistic idea that power corrupts and the nebulous belief that the People are instinctively right and in the end will prevail over despotism, concepts expressed at regular intervals through didactic speechifying by the characters. The movie is noticeably short on specifics, however, and sidesteps difficult issues such as the role of the rule of law in a revolution or an examination of the moral limits of the use of force and violence to effect social and political change. Admittedly, it's likely the film avoids specifics partly because of the fearful climate of the early 1950s, when any sentiments that smacked of socialism or communism were not just suspect, but downright dangerous to anyone connected with the movie business. (Kazan appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and "named names" in April 1952, shortly after Viva Zapata! was released.)

Another failing of the movie is to make the enemies of Zapata and the revolution such ponderously clichéd villains. This is especially true of Fernando Aguirre, the character played by Joseph Wiseman. Aguirre starts out as a sympathetic character and supporter of Zapata but soon becomes a wily provocateur, a sort of Iago figure whose motivations are completely mystifying. Wiseman's performance becomes progressively more mannered, until he is finally just a step away from Dr. No. At the end Aguirre even switches sides and without any explanation becomes Zapata's enemy, Judas to Zapata's Christ-like martyr, another element that steers the film away from clear-headed analysis and too close to unsubtle parable for my liking, a tendency that I find often compromises Steinbeck's fiction. Nor is the film helped by Steinbeck's heavy-handed symbolism—for instance, in the final scene Zapata's white horse running free in the mountains after his death, an obvious symbol of his indomitable spirit as an inspiration to his adoring followers. At the same time, I don't feel entirely comfortable with the romanticized portrayal of the noble Mexican peasants in the film. There is something patronizing in the portrayal of their naïve, childlike simplicity, their passivity that requires strong men of action to lead them, and their almost superstitious faith in messianic figures like Zapata.

I would sum up watching Viva Zapata! as a less than totally satisfying experience, one of admiring its best parts while feeling there is something lacking in the movie as a whole. This is a film designed to be held together by its themes, and those themes are simply not conveyed clearly or compellingly enough to do the job. In the end, despite the presence of Brando, I found Viva Zapata! not far removed from the conventional studio biopics of the 1930s and 1940s.

Mutiny on the Bounty (1962)

Because it was so cold and snowy on New Year’s Day (belated Happy New Year everyone) my plans to go see “Sweeney Todd” became abandoned. I decided to stay in that day. Since I didn’t fall asleep until 4 a.m. the night before, this seemed a fine idea to me.

Because I had the whole day ahead of me, I felt like immersing myself in something long, and wanted something that would work as an antidote to the weather outside. I decided to watch the 1962 version of “Mutiny on the Bounty” that had been given to me as a gift earlier in the year but had not yet watched. Its three-hour running time and an ample supply of South Seas scenery made this the perfect candidate for viewing.

My friend Jim had given me a copy of this film because he’s a big fan of it and we’re both admirers of the Bronislau Kaper score, the Polish composer’s magnum opus. It’s a magnificent, towering score for a disappointing movie. There’s some absolutely marvelous things in it, but looming over it like a deranged relative is Marlon Brando’s wildly eccentric portrayal of Fletcher Christian. A lot of people think Brando is wonderful in it and I was hoping that time would have caught up with his performance, but for me he sinks the film.

Giant spectacles were in vogue in the 1950s and 1960s, giving moviegoers sights and sounds they could not experience on television. Wide screen and stereo sound augmented the big epics of the day. Because M-G-M had experienced a huge critical and popular success with “Mutiny on the Bounty” in 1935 with Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian and Charles Laughton as Captain Bligh, it seemed to take advantage of the new technology in re-telling the famous story.

No need to relate that story here, except to say that Captain Bligh (Trevor Howard) is suitably merciless and nasty, a captain who worked his way up through the ranks of the British Navy to captain his first ship, the Bounty. Brando plays first mate Fletcher Christian as an aristocratic, foppish dandy with an upper crust accent that, for me, does not come off.

A young Richard Harris is the leader of the rebellious crew members, and other familiar faces dot the crew, including Hugh Griffith (Best Supporting Actor Oscar winner for “Ben-Hur” (1959), Percy Herbert (“Mysterious Island” (1961) and Gordon Jackson (“The Great Escape” (1963).

The Bounty is on a mission to collect breadfruit plants from the island of Tahiti, where it is hoped it can be grown elsewhere and serve as a cheap food source for the world. The crew suffers under the cruelty of Captain Bligh, but all is forgiven when they reach the island paradise of Tahiti. The men forget their problems for the three months they are there, but upon returning to sea Bligh resumes his tyranny over the crew until the inevitable occurs.

Trevor Howard makes a suitably cruel Captain Bligh, but he’s no Charles Laughton. Laughton made such a strong impression on audiences that his performance was parodied and imitated in other movies, cartoons and short subjects. When most people think of Captain Bligh, they think of Charles Laughton.

One aspect of the 1962 version I felt was lacking was stressing Bligh’s superb seamanship after the mutiny occurs. Bligh and his crew members who elect to go with him are cast adrift in an open boat thousands of miles from the nearest port. Bligh has one scene where he vows to get them to a safe port. The next scene he is relating his tale to the Admiralty.

The 1935 version shows how torturous that 2,000 mile journey was, one of the great feats in navigation history. It’s one of my favorite sequences of the earlier version, and I’m sorry it was not included here.

Brando kills the film for me though (I should stress his performance has as many fans as it does detractors). Reportedly a holy terror on the set, to the point that Richard Harris and Trevor Howard refused to ever work with him again, Brando drove one director (Carol Reed) off the production halfway through, and so flabbergasted Reed’s replacement, the veteran director Lewis Milestone, that Milestone pretty much let Brando direct his own scenes, just to get the long problem-plagued production over with. This probably explains the scene where Christian interrupts a meeting wearing a nightshirt and cap, smoking a long pipe and talking in the most, how shall I say it, twerpiest and mincing high pitched voice imaginable. It’s Brando at his most eccentric, almost as cringe-inducing as his final scenes on Pitcairn Island.

However, there are wonderful compensations. The producers re-created an actual sailing ship of the era and it’s a thing of beauty to watch as it makes its way halfway across the world. The photography is splendid and the Tahitian locations are staggering in their beauty.

As I said earlier, the film boasts an incredible score by M-G-M staff composer Bronislau Kaper. The film underwent so many cuts that the film was scored and re-scored several times. The invaluable Film Score Monthly record label last year issued a 3-disc CD of the score and its various incarnations. Kaper recorded three different endings to the film, the one heard now (quieter and more melancholy), a more traditional big finish one and one for a prologue and epilogue that were eventually cut out of the film but shown on ABC-TV in the late 1960s for the film’s network television premiere.

My aforementioned friend Jim, who works in a recording studio, took the louder ending and dubbed it onto a separate disc of the film. I actually prefer the bigger ending to the quieter ending. All three are great, though, and it’s interesting to hear how Kaper achieves a different effect using the same thematic material.

Kaper was nominated for an Oscar for Best Score that year but lost to Maurice Jarre for “Lawrence of Arabia” The other score nominees that year were Elmer Bernstein for “To Kill A Mockingbird,” Franz Waxman for “Taras Bulba” and Jerry Goldsmith for “Freud.” I look at that list and compared to what we hear today I want to weep.

My favorite version of the story remains the 1935 version. In 1984, there was a terrific version released with Mel Gibson as Christian and Anthony Hopkins as Bligh. I only saw it once, but remember it being quite good, with Bligh being more sympathetic than usually portrayed and the mutiny being caused by the effects of the hedonistic lifestyle on Tahiti as much as anything else. That version has a screenplay by Robert Bolt, whittled down from a two-part movie he worked on for years for director David Lean. Alas, we never had an opportunity to see a Lean-directed Bounty saga, but what a movie that would have been.

In 1933, a young Errol Flynn stepped before a movie camera for the first time to play Fletcher Christian in an Australian film called “In the Wake of the Bounty.” It’s a crude production, but an interesting one. It probably would be forgotten today if it weren’t for Flynn, who in real life was a distant relation to Fletcher Christian. As a boy Flynn used to play with one of his famous ancestor’s swords. Even before he became a world-famous movie star, Flynn chafed at authority. I’m sure he understood Fletcher Christian very well.

Rating for the 1962 “Mutiny on the Bounty”: Two and a half stars.