Awards & Honors

Mutiny on the Bounty was nominated for seven Oscars®, including Best Picture, Best Cinematography, Best Special Effects, Best Film Editing, Best Music Score, and Best Art Director-Set Decoration, Color. It lost in all categories, with five of the awards going to Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Ironically, Brando had turned down the lead in that film in order to make Mutiny on the Bounty.

Other honors include:
American Cinema Editors nomination for Best Edited Feature (John McSweeney, Jr.)
Directors Guild of America nomination for Lewis Milestone
Golden Globe nominations for Best Motion Picture, Best Score and Best Supporting Actress (Tarita)
Laurel Awards nominations for Top Song and Top Drama
Motion Picture Sound Editors award for Best Sound Editing

THE CRITICS CORNER - MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY

"Superlative entertainment!...It may be somewhat short of dramatic greatness, but it is often overwhelmingly spectacular...Brando in many ways is giving the finest performance of his career. It is a many faceted character development, full of arresting subtleties in facial expression, voice inflection and gestures. The struggle within Christian is brilliantly suggested as well as projected by Brando. He has, too, given the screen its most realistic moment of death...."
- Pry, Variety

"For a robust and rousing enactment of a mutiny in a square-rigged sailing ship, you will have to wait a long time to beat what you will see in Mutiny on the Bounty. The sheer magnitude of this enactment of one of the most famous mutinies in history, and the energy that passionate performances impart to it on the color-filled wide screen render this aspect of the picture a highmark of filmed adventure on the sea....There is so much in this picture that is stirring and beautiful that it is painful to note and call attention to the fact that it also has faults. But it has, and the most obvious of them is the way Marlon Brando makes Fletcher Christian an eccentric....Mr. Brando puts tinsel and cold-cream into Mr. Christian's oddly foppish frame...."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times

"Flaccid epic...Unsurprisingly, the film lacks consistent texture. The departure from Portsmouth, the storm scenes, have excitement, but our first view of the natives is abrupt and ineffective and there is no shot at all of the crew's first sight of the natives."
- Stanley Kauffman, The New Republic

"Brando's performance is a curious one. His first entrance, with an affected English drawl, is momentarily amusing; then one realizes that an affected young Englishman might well have affected this drawl. The same holds true for later exuberances of speech and dress. But in his romantic scenes, he is pleasingly simple and direct; and in the awkwardly written finale he achieves a dignity that transcends his lines. The character of Christian has not been consistently drawn, but Brando keeps trying to force the ends together."
- Arthur Knight, Saturday Review

"Nevertheless, on a not-too-demanding level the film is good enough -- the first hour supremely so. The strange thing is that [Trevor] Howard [as Captain Bligh] and Brando never face each other as well-matched opponents, and what should have been a battle of the giants peters out into nothing very much."
- Richard Whitehall, Films and Filming

"Milestone's overlong and frequently leaden version of the classic tale of sadism and revolt, set in the high-adventure world of an 18th century ship sailing to the South Pacific, is not a patch upon the 1935 Laughton and Gable version. Brando makes a total mess of his English accent, the romantic interlude in Tahiti goes on endlessly, and the visuals (perhaps the main point of interest in the movie) too often resort to travelogue vistas and picture postcard lighting."
- The TimeOut Film Guide

"Lavish remake of 1935 classic can't come near it, although visually beautiful; Howard good as Captain Bligh, but Brando is all wrong as Fletcher Christian. Best thing about this version is spectacular score by Bronislau Kaper."
- Leonard Maltin's Classic Movie Guide

by Frank Miller