"MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY".....OR AS CAPT. BLIGH CALLS IT....FLOGSPOT.COM

Mutiny On The Bounty (1962)      By the time all the swollen, jumbo 3 & 1/2 to 4 hour reserved seat movies finally crawled into our little neighborhood theater, they'd lost considerable weight.......

                No overture.  No intermission music.....(actually no intermission at all). No exit music to play us out as we rushed up the aisle for a much needed pee........

                So there's some amount of fun now watching this movie with all the trimmings restored......and glorying in the sheer immensity of Bronislau Kaper's pounding, insistent score.

                 And the other, more perverse pleasure........watching Marlon Brando deconstruct the role of conflicted mutineer Fletcher Christian and rebuild it, chunk by lumpy chunk, into his own internal mindset.

                 It's as if there's two movies going on here........the mega budget 'Bounty' and another strange little trip through Brando's head, cut off from the epic surrounding his character.

                Brando's in his own movie, deep in his own method acting (the hellish bane of veteran directors like 'Bounty;'s Lewis Milestone), while the other actors (Trevor Howard as the vile, heartless Capt. Bligh and Richard Harris as an oppressed, flogged crew member) play directly upfront to the audience.

                 It all makes for one hell of a strange spectacle -  Brando kicks off the movie by mincing around like a cartoon aristocratic fop who escaped from a Restoration comedy.    Then he spends the rest of the movie mumbling barely audible asides at Capt. Bligh's various atrocities.........like a more high-toned Billy Jack waiting to reach his boiling point.

                 Say what you will about the dogged eccentricity of Brando's acting, even with his literally mumblecore performance, we still take pure pleasure out of "Mutiny On The Bounty"...…...a sweeping epic that derives its power from the charisma of its lead actors, and not from 500 CGI artists throwing digitized versions of the actors into the sides of skyscrapers...…

                  Speaking of sweeping, when an old-school multi-million dollar blockbuster like this promises you a cast of 1000's, they're not kidding. So when what looks like the entire Tahitian nation comes sailing out to meet the Bounty......it's over a 1000 real people in real boats...…(not a pixel in sight)

                   While Brando's goofball portrayal and notorious behavior led to the movie being judged as a catastrophe one day after it opened, the BQ's still happy to have it around......overture, intermission and exit music included. 3 stars (***) for a deeply flawed but still entertaining epic...….the kind of larger-than-life, logistically foolhardy moviemaking you're not likely to ever see again.