Mutiny on the Bounty (1935 film) since the inception of talking pictures. It is grim, gripping and pictorially perfect." John Mosher of "The New Yorker" declared that the filmmakers had "done a good, solid, fine job" and wrote that Laughton's performance as Captain Bligh "may not be exactly the image of the original brute, but it's a Laughton masterpiece." "Mutiny on the Bounty" topped the annual "Film Daily" poll of 523 critics as the best film of 1936 (it was released too late in the year to appear on the 1935 ballot). According to MGM records the film earned $2,250,000 in the US and Canada and
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935 film) a Best Picture Oscar and has come to be re-evaluated by some critics. In 1984 Mel Gibson played Christian opposite Anthony Hopkins as Bligh in a film (based not upon the Nordhoff-Hall novels but on an historical work by Richard Hough) called "The Bounty". This latest version, which gives a far more sympathetic view of Bligh, is considered to be the closest to historical events. The 1935 version was itself not the first film account of the mutiny. In 1933 an Australian film entitled "In the Wake of the Bounty", with the then-unknown Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian, was released,