Tyrant of the Sea Tyrant of the Sea Tyrant of the Sea is a 1950 American historical war film directed by Lew Landers and starring Ron Randell, Rhys Williams and Lester Matthews. It is set during the Napoleonic Wars, with Admiral Horatio Nelson appearing as a character. The film began as a project "The Return of Captain Bligh" and was to star Charles Laughton, who had famously played Captain Bligh in "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935). However Laughton did not want to repeat his performance so the project was rewritten to focus on a fictitious character. Rhys Williams played the part based on Bligh.
Clark Gable seeing the rough cuts, agreed. Portraitist Al Hirschfeld created a drawing, and then a lithograph, portraying the film's stars Clift, Monroe, and Gable with screenwriter Miller, in what is suggested as a typical "on-the-set" scene during the troubled production. Throughout his life, Gable was fond of the work of artist Reinhold Palenske, and they were close friends. Gable was a conservative Republican, though he never publicly spoke about politics. His third wife, Carole Lombard, was an activist liberal Democrat, and she cajoled him into supporting Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the New Deal. In 1944, he became an early