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
Clark Gable with Spencer Tracy, which boosted Tracy's career and permanently cemented them in the public mind as a team. "San Francisco" (1936) featured Tracy in an only 17-minute, but Oscar-nominated, role in which he played a priest who knocks Gable, by then the studio's foremost leading man, down in a boxing ring. Their next film together was "Test Pilot" with Myrna Loy, in which Gable plays a dashing test pilot and Tracy is his admiring sidekick, another box office bonanza for the studio. For their final film, "Boom Town", Tracy moves up a rung with a larger part than earlier, almost