by Stephen Vagg
Charles Chauvel’s third feature is one of his worst and didn’t do that well at the box office but, conversely, it’s one of his best known, at least internationally. There are two main reasons for this, minor and major: it featured footage of Pitcairn Island that was bought by Hollywood and seen in some shorts (minor) and introduced Errol Flynn as an actor (major). For these reasons, and others, In the Wake of the Bounty is definitely worth watching, despite its flaws.
In the early 1930s, Chauvel’s filmmaking career, as it was, was oddly placed. His first two films – Greenhide and Moth of Moonbi – hadn’t done much, and he was having to do various jobs to pay the rent. However, making Greenhide had introduced Chauvel to his wife and soulmate Elsa, who would be an invaluable collaborator for the rest of Charles’ life and career. And the filmmaker always had a lot of ambition and drive (not to mention a knack for raising money) and came up with a really strong idea.
That was to make a film about the Mutiny on the Bounty, the legendary epic of Captain Bligh, Fletcher Christian, breadfruit, Pitcairn Island etc., which had already been the topic of a 1916 Australian film from Raymond Longford. Chauvel was fond of an exotic location shoot, and his notion was to head off to Tahiti and Pitcairn Island along with Elsa and photographer Tasman Higgins. They came back with some amazing stuff which captures life on these islands – particularly invaluable for Pitcairn, which is rarely visited, even today.
On his return, Chauvel hired a studio in Sydney and shot dramatic scenes to go with this footage – the story of the Bounty, as recounted by a blind man in a tavern, recalling Bligh (Mayne Lynton), Fletcher Christian (Errol Flynn), and other sailors including Ned Young (John Warwick who later wrote and appeared in TV plays such as Cobwebs in Concrete). This segment doesn’t go for very long – most of the movie consists of a documentary about Tahiti and Pitcairn, then at the end it turns dramatic again with scenes of Christian and Young at Pitcairn, then it goes into a whole new dramatic story about a couple with a sick child on Pitcairn radioing a ship for help and being ignored and [spoilers] the baby dies.
What a downer.
So, In the Wake of the Bounty is a really odd frog – not just part-drama/part-documentary but part-two-different-dramas/part-two documentaries. We’re guessing he did this because he didn’t have enough money to make a proper feature. Charles Chauvel knew how to capture terrific footage but didn’t really understand how to tell a story or direct actors until much later in his career.
The dramatic scenes are amateurish and cheap, like suburban theatre, but are fascinating because of Flynn’s performance. He’s tall, handsome and all that, but is incredibly awkward, clearly unsure how to stand, where to put his hands or how to deliver lines. In his defence, he’d done nil acting before this – he was plucked out of nowhere (accounts vary on his discovery) while trying to make it as a writer/gold miner/adventurer… He wouldn’t get serious about acting until he moved to England and joined Northampton Rep – and he never really treated acting with the respect it deserved. It’s not as though Flynn’s much worse than the other actors, though.
Still, in hindsight, it was a mistake of Chauvel not to try and make two films with this material – one a full feature about the Bounty mutiny using location footage, and the other a proper documentary. Because everyone agreed the documentary stuff is incredible. And some of the drama scenes have tremendous potential, notably Christian being torn with guilt over the mutiny, and Christian and Ned Young holed up in a hut on Pitcairn with Tahitians out to kill them.
If Chauvel had made a proper drama story of the Bounty, he would have been able to cash in on the success of the 1932 novel Mutiny on the Bounty by Nordhoff and Hall that was filmed by MGM in 1935 – Chauvel would’ve beaten that to the punch. (As it was, MGM bought up copies of In the Wake of the Bounty to cut into travelogues to support its Bounty movie – which became a blockbuster – and presumably also to stop any enterprising competitor trying to steal the studio’s thunder by pushing an Australian Bounty story starring Errol Flynn, who’d become a film star by 1935).
Anyway, the fact that Chauvel even made In the Wake of the Bounty was a triumph – not just the logistics of going to Pitcairn but getting the film back into Australia: censors confiscated some footage because it contained vision of naked Tahitian women and Chauvel had to fight to get it back. One just wishes it was better.
Still, it’s a consistently interesting mess.
In the Wake of the Bounty is available to stream on Brollie.
