Mutiny on the Bounty (1935 film) the mutineers who stayed on Tahiti. At the time he was halfway around the world on a second voyage for breadfruit plants. Fletcher Christian's father had died many years before Christian's travels on board "Bounty", whereas the film shows the elder Christian at the trial. The movie was always presented as an adaptation of the Nordhoff and Hall trilogy, which already differed from the actual story of the mutiny. Bligh is depicted as a brutal, sadistic disciplinarian. Particular episodes include a keelhauling and flogging a dead man. Neither of these happened. Keelhauling was used rarely, if at all, and had
Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), based on the popular namesake novel by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall, and starring Charles Laughton and Clark Gable as Bligh and Christian, respectively. The film's story was presented, says Dening, as "the classic conflict between tyranny and a just cause"; Laughton's portrayal became in the public mind the definitive Bligh, "a byword for sadistic tyranny". The two subsequent major films, "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1962) with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando, and "The Bounty" (1984) with Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson, largely perpetuated this image of Bligh and that of Christian as tragic hero. The latter film