Published 2017 on Down Under Flix
Director: Charles Chauvel
Director: Charles Chauvel
Stars: Errol Flynn, Mayne Lynton
Following my earlier tag team reviews of Ghosts … of the Civil Dead and The Wannabes, this week I team with another friend and contemporary to
review the oldest film (thus far) covered on Down Under Flix, 1933’s In the
Wake of the Bounty. Directed by Charles Chauvel and starring Errol Flynn, the
film chronicles Fletcher Christian’s mutiny against William Bligh on the HMS
Bounty and pays an anthropological visit to modern day Pitcairn Island. I’m
joined below by Flynn enthusiast and scholar Michael X. Savvas.
Ben: The 1789 mutiny aboard the HMS Bounty is one of the most
famous tales in naval lore. The event – in which Fletcher Christian and his
fellow mutineers, driven to breaking point, ejected their tyrannical leader
Lieutenant William Bligh and his supporters from their ship – has been adapted
to film several times. Frank Lloyd’s 1935 production Mutiny on the Bounty pitted
Clark Gable’s Christian against Charles Laughton’s Bligh. Lewis Milestone’s
similarly titled 1962 version pitted Marlon Brando as Christian against Trevor
Howard as Bligh, and was a notoriously difficult and expensive production,
largely due to Brando’s off-screen machinations. And 1984’s underrated The Bounty, directed by the
underrated Roger Donaldson, squared a post-Mad
Max, pre-Lethal
Weapon Mel Gibson in the Christian role against Anthony Hopkins’
Bligh. However, the first two film versions of the Bounty story were
Australian: a 1916 silent film helmed by Raymond Longford and 1933’s In the Wake of the Bounty, directed
by Charles Chauvel. It’s rather appropriate that these earliest dramatizations
heralded from Australia, given Australia’s close geographical proximity to
Tahiti and Pitcairn Island (where Christian and co settled post-mutiny) and the
fact that Bligh would subsequently become Governor of New South Wales (and,
during his tenure, incite yet another mutiny with 1808’s Rum Rebellion).
In
the Wake of the Bounty is most famous for marking the screen debut of Errol
Flynn. Two years later he would become a Hollywood icon with another maritime
adventure, Captain Blood,
and while his performance in In
the Wake of the Bounty doesn’t really convey the charisma that
would make him a superstar, there’s something fitting about the fact both Flynn
and Gibson would essay the role of Christian. Flynn is, I would argue, the
biggest Hollywood superstar Australia ever produced. Films like Captain Blood, The Adventures of Robin Hood, The Charge of the Light Brigade,
and The Sea Hawk were
juggernauts of their era, and while today’s invasive paparazzi, marketing
machine, and social media culture have made them omnipresent, modern Australian
superstars like Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, and Hugh Jackman pale in
comparison to Flynn’s stature relative to his era and at the height of his
stardom. Gibson is arguably the closest we’ve come to producing a star that
matches Flynn as a matinee idol, sex symbol, and commercial force, and it’s
interesting to note that both stars endured very public falls from grace, as
well as finding creative expression in other fields: Flynn in his writing,
Gibson in directing. Yet while Gibson was a rising star at the time of The Bounty’s release, still
finding his footing in Hollywood but with burgeoning star wattage and a
respectable CV boasting Mad Max, The Road Warrior, Gallipoli, and The Year of Living Dangerously,
Flynn was a screen novice in In
the Wake of the Bounty, all raw potential and not necessarily
delivering.
Michael,
as Down Under Flix’s appointed Flynn expert, what was it that made Flynn a
superstar, and does any of that shine through in In the Wake of the Bounty?
Michael: As you mentioned, Flynn had (champagne) bucket-loads of
that mysterious, elusive quality we call charisma, which made him eminently
watchable on the silver screen. On top of that, as his best film roles matched
his adventurous off-screen personality, Flynn made you believe in his acting.
But not always. Viewers of In
the Wake of the Bounty may think Flynn’s unrealistic acting
makes Keanu Reeves look like an actor of subtlety and depth in comparison. And
yet, there are glimpses of Flynn’s compelling screen presence in said film.
Of
all the Hollywood movie stars, Flynn had the most interesting and colourful
life (George Raft, whose real-life gangster escapades and friendships also gave
his screen persona authenticity, was the silver medal winner). Before becoming
a movie star, Flynn grew up in Tasmania, Sydney, and England, inheriting a lifelong
passion for learning and discovery from his academic father. In contrast to young
Errol’s privileged upbringing and public schooling in England, he later became
part of a notorious razor gang in Sydney. He also sailed up the east coast of
Australia and lived in the New Guinea highlands, working as a cadet patrol
officer, manager of a copra plantation and even as a slave trader, ultimately
taking a group of New Guinea natives to Sydney to exhibit them. Clearly, Flynn
was no poster boy for political correctness, even before political correctness
was a thing and Australia became the bastion of PC that it is today. And yet,
true to Flynn’s paradoxical nature and refusal to be bound and gagged by any
simplistic categorizing, he also worked as a foreign correspondent for
Australia’s Bulletin newspaper,
submitting surprisingly empathetic and reverent articles about the indigenous
inhabitants of New Guinea. Through his unusual life experiences, Flynn
developed a manner that would command the attention and admiration of men and
women alike. By Flynn’s own telling, his time in New Guinea taught him how to
be a leader of men.
In
many of Flynn’s film roles, in the golden days when leading men could be both
tough and elegant, Flynn is an elegant and articulate rebel leader, and his
role in In the Wake of the
Bounty is the prototype for this. Such a defining persona
would even be useful toward the end of Flynn’s life, when he was granted rare
access to Cuba’s Sierra Maestra jungles to interview guerrilla fighter Fidel
Castro and advise the Cuban Robin Hood on public speaking. Flynn would develop
a well-modulated and pleasant-sounding voice (albeit slightly higher than one
would expect for such a tough guy). Flynn’s voice in In the Wake of the Bounty is
inconsistent in tone and accent, yet we can already see some of Flynn’s highly
believable charisma as a leader, even if mostly conveyed though his unflinching
self-confidence and seething glares. Also, Flynn’s acting in said film must be
partly blamed on director Chauvel. In
the Wake of the Bounty was made in 1933, six years after the
original talkie, The Jazz
Singer, was released. Many films from the 1930s now appear
unrealistic, as actors and filmmakers were still getting used to talking movies
needing a very different style of acting than stage productions or silent
films. The exaggerated gestures often required in plays and silent films were
no longer appropriate in talkies, in which the subtle gestures and nuances we
would later associate with Keanu could be captured. So in one of the very few
times in Flynn’s life that he probably agreed to follow instructions rather
than his own instincts, this may have been to his detriment.
To
me, one of the most fascinating things about Flynn was his power to explore,
blur and demonstrate the interplay between reality and illusion. Apart from
his Bulletin articles,
Flynn worked as a foreign correspondent in Spain during the Civil War and wrote
an accomplished novel, Showdown,
and two riveting autobiographies, Beam
Ends and My
Wicked, Wicked Ways. Yet in these writings, it is difficult to know
what is real and what Flynn invented in order to tell tales of adventure and
intrigue that crackle on the page as Flynn the man would crackle on the screen.
Even Flynn himself, a prolific reader who took to wearing an embroidered
question mark on his shirts, appeared confused about where reality ended and
fantasy began. Flynn’s publicists at Warner Brothers promoted Flynn as Irish,
as people just didn’t believe the reality: that Flynn was born in exotic
Tasmania. Before finding fame, Flynn’s strategy to secure what he wanted was to
present himself as already successful. When he was so poor that he couldn’t
afford a proper meal, he would dress immaculately as though he were wealthy and
successful. Feeling terrified during scandalous court appearances later in
life, Flynn deliberately pretended to be assured and casual. This approach of
acting as the person he wanted to become is now recognized as a valid
psychological strategy for success. When Flynn was most effective as an actor,
he was being the people he had learned to be in ‘the real world’, and when he
was most effective in ‘the real world’, he was often acting. Another example
from In the Wake of the
Bounty of Flynn straddling the twin horses of reality and
illusion is that although Flynn was playing Christian Fletcher in a
dramatization of the Bounty incident, in reality, Flynn was already a seasoned
sailor and a descendant of one of the actual mutineers
from the Bounty, Midshipman Young. (In a further irony, another of Midshipman
Young’s descendants, Benjamin Young, is shown in authentic footage of Pitcairn
Island from In the Wake of
the Bounty).
Ben: On reflection, you’re right that we should probably give
Flynn the benefit of the doubt acting-wise here. Whilst his stilted, overly
emphatic, staring-dead-ahead delivery in In the Wake of the Bounty isn’t exactly the
stuff that stars are made of, none of the other actors in the cast fare much
better. Two years and one film later, Flynn’s onscreen charisma would ripen
tremendously with Captain
Blood, and that film’s director, Michael Curtiz, wasn’t exactly a
benevolent nurturer of talent. So I’d agree we can put some of the onus for
Flynn’s In the Wake of the
Bounty performance on Chauvel and the burgeoning “talkie”
techniques of the time, and assume the actor course-corrected acting-wise
between films.
Still,
Chauvel was no slouch or rank amateur directing-wise. In the mid-1920s he
worked in various capacities on Hollywood productions before returning to
Australia to apply his trade. He made a pair of silent films in Australia in
1926, then after a fallow period returned with In the Wake of the Bounty, his first sound film.
But his best-known works came in subsequent decades, with films like Forty Thousand Horsemen (1940)
and The Rats of Tobruk (1944),
both featuring Chips Rafferty, and arguably his best and most widely known
film, Jedda (1955).
The Chauvel Cinema in Paddington, NSW is named after the filmmaker, and if you
wander down the road to the Moore Park entertainment quarter, you’ll see a
giant billboard for Jedda among
the various billboards celebrating milestone Australian films.
Chauvel’s
career trajectory ended up being quite different to that forecast by In the Wake of the Bounty, which
was conceived as the first in a series of exotic travelogues melded with
dramatizations of historical events from those locales. Introductory text at
the start of the film declares it:
the
first of a series of great travel films to be produced by Expeditionary Films
Ltd. depicting strange incidents, strange places and strange peoples. Each
travel feature will contain the thread of a story based upon a true life drama…
The audience will follow in the wake of the Bounty with Mr. and Mrs. Charles
Chauvel as they traversed 15,000 miles in the South Seas to secure the exact
backgrounds upon which the drama of the Bounty was enacted. Expeditionary Films
has not spared time or money to blaze a new trail – a trail which they hope
will lead to many pleasant hours amidst adventure and romance.
The
concept was a great sales pitch, and bespoke an appetite for globetrotting and
high sea adventure befitting Errol Flynn himself. This grand plan didn’t
eventuate, alas, though Chauvel and his wife & collaborator Elsa would proceed
to make films all around Australia, if not the globe.
In
the Wake of the Bounty is divided into two parts. The first part of the film is
Chauvel’s re-enactment of the events before, during, and following the mutiny
aboard the Bounty. These scenes featuring Flynn as Christian and Mayne Lyndon
as Bligh were filmed later in the production at Cinesound studios in Bondi NSW,
also home to the Dad and
Dave films of the era. The second part of the film, shot first
and over a period of five months, is a documentary chronicling the daily lives
of the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island, all descendants of the original
mutineers. Chauvel and co spent three months in Pitcairn and an additional two
in Tahiti filming this content. In an era where we can record all manner of
phenomena in far-flung exotic destinations on our smartphones and upload the
clips to YouTube in a matter of seconds, this footage lacks much of its
original novelty, but when considered in context it represents an important
piece of cinematic anthropology. It’s also more engaging and interesting, I
would argue, than the dramatic retelling of the mutiny and surrounding events
that precedes it. Like the documentary footage, it’s important to contextualize
those scenes within their time of production, but the fact remains that
watching the film today, nearly 85 years later, those dramatic scenes are
pretty creaky. That feeling is only accentuated when one compares those scenes
to subsequent film versions of the story: an unfair sport weighed unfavourably
against Chauvel’s film, but one that’s difficult to avoid. Watch the 1960 or
1984 films with their lush, intoxicating photography and epic scales – or,
indeed, watch Aboriginal artist Tracy Moffat’s short film Other, compiled partly from footage from these two films among others
– and it’s easy to see why star Marlon Brando would be seduced by Tahiti (not
to mention his leading lady), something which Chauvel’s film struggles to convey.
Michael,
am I being harsh on the first half of In
the Wake of the Bounty, or would you agree the film fares better in
its anthropological second half?
Michael: I think you’re on the money, Ben, with your judgment about the
two different segments of In
the Wake of the Bounty. To me, the Bounty dramatization in the
first part was mainly interesting as Flynn’s initial film role. However, the
mostly documentary style of the second part of the film, examining Pitcairn
Island and the actual descendants of the Bounty (other than Flynn), has
multiple points of interest. Some of these are intentional on Chauvel’s part
and some aren’t. For instance, a quirky anthropological detail that Chauvel
chose to mention and film is that the male Pitcairn Islanders would wear naval
uniforms to church. Other aspects of the documentary are now interesting from
the smug and sagacious safety of a modern cultural perspective. One of the most
striking examples of this is the way that Polynesian women are portrayed in the
film. The film’s narration is predictably patronizing in its contrast between
the British mutineers, ‘white fools’ who should know better than to mess with
native women, and the Tahitian women themselves, who have no way of knowing
better (‘dusky maid[s]’, ‘mischievous brown girls’ and ‘dark pagans’). A
consequence of the ludicrous historical assumption that non-white women are not
quite human is the conclusion that they cannot possibly arouse sexual feelings
in white males. It’s the National
Geographic model, in which near-naked bodies of indigenous
women could be displayed in unsealed magazines for teenagers in dental waiting
rooms to furtively look at. Which we did! Oblivious to strange adult thinking,
Western teenage boys learnt from a young age that National Geographic was
the go-to for a cavalcade of breasts of varying sizes and shapes. Chauvel
employs the same National
Geographic approach to sexuality in In the Wake of the Bounty, in
which Polynesian nymphs frolic to and fro, boobs bared with pride and swagger.
The irony of being able to show women half-naked in a 1933 film (during the
Hays Code) would not have been lost on Flynn. In his autobiography, My Wicked, Wicked Ways (Heinemann,
Great Britain, 1960), Flynn took great relish and several sentences in
describing the ‘glorious pair of breasts’ of Maihiati, a Melanesian lady he
encountered in New Guinea (p. 49). In another one of those particularly
Flynn-like, life-imitates-art ironies, Flynn himself was probably part
Polynesian (on his mother Marelle’s side). Don Norman, an historian and former
friend of Flynn’s from Hobart, once showed me a photograph of Flynn in which he
pointed out how Flynn’s Polynesian features were apparent.
In
spite of the intriguing documentary Chauvel created for the second part
of In the Wake of the Bounty,
the film ends with a dramatized story that is clearly meant to be poignant but
is just strangely morbid and would fit better into a novel by Thomas Hardy: the
death of a baby. What the!?
Ben: It’s a strange note to end on, and further denotes the quite
peculiar hybrid status of In
the Wake of the Bounty as dramatization, documentary,
travelogue, and anthropological artifact. Whilst there’s a marked disjunction
between the film’s stage-bound and rather conventionally shot scenes on the one
hand and its striking seafaring footage and depictions of Tahitian island life
on the other, both threads have their value, albeit largely historical. The
island footage is a fascinating anthropological record of life in an outwardly unblemished
paradise, and some of it would even be used in the promotion of 1935’s
Hollywood version of the Bounty story. And the dramatic scenes, creaky as they
are, are valuable as a record of Flynn’s first feature film work and portrait
of the artist pre-stardom. Whilst he’s not widely familiar to audiences today –
for many, classic Hollywood begins and ends with the four figures on Gottfried Helnwein’s Boulevard of Broken Dreams – Flynn’s shadow looms
over any actor who dabbles in the historical adventure genre. It also continues
to loom over Australian films and filmmakers, despite the fact he worked
largely overseas. I’ll wrap with two examples of this legacy. Firstly, Flynn
provided a touchstone for writer-director-star Yahoo Serious when concocting
his wacky take on the Ned Kelly legend, 1993’s Reckless Kelly. As the multi-hyphenate explained
in a Cinema Papers interview,
“Errol Flynn was accidentally discovered and became a movie star, so Ned gets
accidentally discovered and becomes a movie star” (no. 92, p. 34). A few years
later, when casting his 2003 adaptation of Peter Pan, P.J. Hogan (director of Muriel’s Wedding and My Best Friend’s Wedding)
emphasized to his producers that “for the part of Peter Pan, we are looking for
Errol Flynn age 12 years old” (Finding
Queensland in Australian Cinema, 2016, p. 80). From iconic outlaws
to the defender of Neverland and many more between and beyond, Flynn’s persona and
legacy continue to find new footholds in popular culture…
Thanks again to Michael X. Savvas for contributing to this
review. Michael is an author of both fiction and non-fiction, and notable
publications include an essay on Flynn in the book Something Rich and
Strange, available via Wakefield Press, and the book One Dream
Ago: The Beatles’ South Australian Connections, co-edited with Olivia
Savvas-Koopmans (Single X Publications, Adelaide, 2010).