[4] It stars Charles Laughton as William Bligh, Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian, and Franchot Tone as Roger Byam (based on Peter Heywood).

Bligh is a brutal tyrant who routinely administers harsh punishment to officers and crew alike who lack discipline, cause any infraction on board the ship, or defy his authority in any manner.

After press ganging a crew out of a local pub, the Bounty sets sail from Portsmouth on a two-year voyage across the Pacific, to transport breadfruit from the Polynesian islands to Jamaica.

Christian, although initially opposing the idea, decides he can no longer tolerate Bligh's brutality when he witnesses crew members shackled in iron chains, and he approves the mutiny.

Due to the intervention of his friend Sir Joseph Banks and Lord Hood, Byam is pardoned by King George III and allowed to resume his naval career at sea.

Meanwhile, Christian has found Pitcairn, an uninhabited yet sustainable island that he believes will provide adequate refuge from the reach of the Royal Navy.

Director Frank Lloyd purchased the rights to the novel and offered to sell the project to MGM chief Irving Thalberg, on the condition that he be allowed to direct and star, and that the film be shot on-location in Tahiti.

[4] Frank Lloyd and Thalberg undertook extensive research of 18th century British naval customs and archival records pertaining to the actual mutiny, in a bid for his historical authenticity.

[4] The film was originally conceived as a starring vehicle for Wallace Beery (as Bligh) and Robert Montgomery (as Byam), but both were replaced before production began.

[4] Charles Laughton, who had a severe self-image complex concerning his weight and unattractive looks, suffered horribly in comparing himself to the handsome, masculine Clark Gable.

[4] James Cagney (then on a hiatus from Warner Bros. during a contract dispute) and future stars David Niven and Dick Haymes were uncredited extras in the movie.

The August 13, 1950 edition of the Long Beach Press-Telegram reports that sometime after conversion to a fishing barge, the ship had dragged its anchor during a storm, battered herself against the breakwater, and sank.

[7] The Nanuk (replica Pandora) was sold sometime between 1941 and 1946 to the Pacific National Shipping Company of Mexico, where her masts were removed, and Lloyds would lister her working as an oil-powered motor freighter.

One seaman, James Valentine, died of an ill-defined respiratory illness; logs indicate he was "seized with a violent hollow Cough and spit much."

And the ship's surgeon, Thomas Huggan, apparently died of complications due to his chronic alcoholism, not as a result of abuse by Bligh.

Notably, the crew had been examined constantly for scurvy, and Bligh – his expertise in this matter developed under Captain James Cook – had detected no verified signs of the illness at any time.

Likewise, the film shows the mutineers taking over the ship only after killing several loyal crewmen, when in fact none died (although one crewman came very close to shooting Bligh until stopped by Christian).

[citation needed] In the final scene of the film, Christian gives a rousing speech to his fellow mutineers, speaking of creating a perfect society of free men on Pitcairn, away from Bligh and the navy.

Andre Sennwald of The New York Times wrote, "Grim, brutal, sturdily romantic, made out of horror and desperate courage, it is as savagely exciting and rousingly dramatic a photoplay as has come out of Hollywood in recent years.

The site's consensus reads: "The historical inaccuracies in this high-seas adventure are more than offset by its timeless themes, larger-than-life performances from Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, and Frank Lloyd's superb direction".

It would be based on a novel by Charles Nordhoff about Christian's romantic adventures in England and South America following the colonization of Pitcairn Island and would be produced by Carey Wilson.

In 1984, Mel Gibson played Christian opposite Anthony Hopkins as Bligh in a film (based not upon the Nordhoff-Hall novels but on an historical work by Richard Hough) called The Bounty.

In 1933 an Australian film entitled In the Wake of the Bounty, with the then-unknown Errol Flynn as Fletcher Christian, was released, but was not successful and received few bookings outside Australia.

Flynn noted in his autobiography that whenever he mentioned that he'd played Christian in an Australian version of Mutiny on the Bounty two years before Gable, no one ever believed him.