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 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,