as CAPTAIN WILLIAM BLIGH
 |
| Won: New York Film Critics Circle - Best Actor |
If there was anything I was looking forward to going into
Mutiny on the Bounty, it was Charles Laughton. This is because I tend to thoroughly enjoy villainous characters--I just think that the depiction of evil is a complicated art and can be so fascinating on the screen when done right. Further, Laughton's performance as the vile Edward Barrett in
The Barretts of Wimpole Street was, in my opinion, the best thing about that movie, so I was pretty curious to see what he would do with the real-life ship captain who was supposedly so terrible that he provoked his men to mutiny
on more than one occasion. More fuel to the fire was the fact that Laughton was also the very first recipient of the Best Actor prize through the New York Film Critics Circle, which was just about the only precursor award to the Oscars in 1935 and would remain so until the Golden Globes came along nearly a decade later. I've mentioned
in a prior post that there is a steady build-up leading to Bligh's onscreen reveal, and yet once we see him getting aboard the Bounty, director Frank Lloyd (annoyingly) films the entire sequence in long-shot--and just like that this allegedly larger-than-life, terrible man whom everyone is supposed to be so afraid of is cinematically framed to look like another tiny individual amongst a ship of many tiny individuals. A very anticlimactic entrance and very...unremarkable, if you will.
