AWARDS & HONORS

Charles Laughton won the first New York Film Critics Award for Best Actor for his performances in Mutiny on the Bounty and Ruggles of Red Gap (1935).

Mutiny on the Bounty was the leading contender at the Academy Awards®, with eight nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Laughton, Clark Gable and Franchot Tone), Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Score. It won for Best Picture, with The Informer beating it for Best Actor (Victor McLaglen), Director (John Ford), Screenplay and Score.

The film's unprecedented (and still unmatched) three Oscar® nominations for Best Actor helped prompt the Motion Picture Academy® to add awards for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress the following year.

Mutiny on the Bounty was the last film to win the Oscar® for Best Picture without taking any other Academy Awards®. Sharing that distinction were The Broadway Melody (1929) and Grand Hotel (1932), which wasn't even nominated for any other Oscars®.

The film was the first remake to take the Oscar® for Best Picture, although MGM probably would not have considered it a remake of the 1933 Australian film In the Wake of the Bounty.

The Critics' Corner: MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

"Mutiny on the Bounty is the cinema at its best, and it does a job which the legitimate stage, lacking sweep and scope and sky and sea, could never hope to achieve. The only reservation is that those two Tahitian sweethearts seemed snatched right out of the Vassar daisy chain."
- Don Herold, Life

"Seemingly destined to be one of the most important in the industry's history, this production commands attention. Long in the making, a fact that bespeaks the care and effort exerted to assure authenticity in every detail, MGM's purse strings were pulled wide open."
- Richard Watts, Jr., New York Herald Tribune

"Those who were thrilled by the book will find that the film meets all expectations. It is a story of brutality, fierce courage, unquenchable hope, powerful drama, against a wide sweep of sea and sky. Charles Laughton achieves a superb characterization as Captain Bligh. Gable and Tone give vivid performances, while the members of the crew are individuals, not types; we learn to know them well. If the picture leaves any regret, it concerns the scenes in Tahiti, which are so sensuous and languid that they mar the tone and retard the tempo of the film. On the whole, the direction is outstanding."
- John Mosher, The New Yorker

"Charles Laughton's performance as Captain Bligh in the Mutiny on the Bounty fixes him in my mind at any rate as by far the best of living actors."
- Mark Van Doren, The Nation

"An exotic and gripping piece of Hollywood mythology, made with all the technical skill and gloss one associates with Irving Thalberg's MGM....Laughton scowls magnificently, and paints a remarkable portrait of Bligh's humourless character, while Gable injects a startling (and unintentional) bisexuality into the Tahitian sequences."
- Adrien Turner, TimeOut Film Guide

"A still-entertaining adventure film which seemed at the time like the pinnacle of Hollywood's achievement but can now be seen to be slackly told, with wholesale pre-release editing very evident. Individual scenes and performances are however refreshingly well-handled."
- Halliwell's Film & Video Guide

"A stirring 18th-century sea adventure in the big M-G-M manner...As Charles Laughton plays him, the corrupt, sadistic Bligh is the strongest person on the screen...He's a great villain - twisted and self-righteous - and you can't laugh him off. He transcends campiness...The director, Frank Lloyd, goes after "human interest" details in a broad, conventional manner, and some of the bits of business of the minor characters are tediously simple-minded. But for the kind of big budget, studio controlled romantic adventure that this is, it's very well done."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies

"Film hasn't the sense of adventure, eroticism, or psychological complexities of the 1962 remake with Trevor Howard and Marlon Brando...or the revisionist 1984 film, The Bounty, starring Anthony Hopkins and Mel Gibson. But it's the superior film. Its power comes from neither Bligh or Christian ever backing down from each other during an argument, even when the other has the upper hand. Laughton's Bligh is one of the screen's most memorable tyrants..."
- Danny Peary, Guide For the Film Fanatic

"...an example of Hollywood studio craftsmanship at its most accomplished.."
- The Oxford Companion to Film

"The confrontation of good and evil is not subtle or ambiguous. The only real dramatic interest lies in the depths and curlicues of Laughton's depression, and the way he rallies when cast adrift. It was as if he knew that he had found his most hateful role and the role that every impersonator would hammer at."
- David Thomson, Have You Seen...?

Compiled by Frank Miller