Pitcairn Island Today

Pitcairn Island Today (1935)

*** (out of 4)

One of two shorts MGM made to show some backstory to their MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY. This one here takes a look at the island today as we are show some relatives to the original story as well as seeing footage of where the original Mutiny men stayed. Apparently the fate of the men is pretty much looked over here but I guess that's because all but one of them were eventually murdered. I guess one could understand MGM not wanting to show off the ugliness of this beautiful island but either way one shouldn't be watching this for some sort of history lesson. I think the film works best as just an item showing off the island, its people and some of the historic places on it. There's certainly nothing ground breaking here but I think it's a fitting short to watch after seeing the Clark Gable film.

This over seventy year old short documentary isn't exactly a contemporary record of life on the isolated Pitcairn Island. Still it's an interesting view of how life evolved up to the middle of the 20th Century for the Bounty descendants.

Naturally we get to meet a whole lot of people named Christian, some named Quintal, some named McCoy names familiar to those who've read Nordhoff&Hall's novel and have seen more or more of the films about the most famous mutiny in history.

Though it's not recorded in any of the films dealing with the mutiny the mutineers were in fact all killed save one in quarrels with the natives over the native women. Only a fellow named John Adams of the mutineers was actually around when Pitcairn was rediscovered and re-charted by the geographers. I guess at that point it wasn't worth the effort for the Admiralty to open up that old can of worms again.

In 1935 life still looked pretty rugged, but the Pitcairners seem to have made a nice little society for themselves. It's still a forbidding landscape with no natural harbor. That and because it was not chartered right on the maps the Royal Navy was using at the time was the reason that Fletcher Christian chose the place as their new home.

Pitcairn Island Today remains a fine documentary and a nice coda to the MGM film that won for Best Picture of 1935

Geographically, islands that few people know about are some of the most interesting places to get educated on. This short from MGM focuses on Pitcairn Island; a place that will be forever associated with one of the Royal Navy's greatest tragedies. The Bounty, a British ship attempting to sail to Tahiti in order to bring food to slaves working in the West Indies, was overtaken by a revolt in the year 1787. The captain, William Bligh, was a firm believer in hierarchy and order, so much so that the crew mutinied against him under a mate named Fletcher Christian. The Bounty eventually goes back to tahiti, and the crew marry native women. As anybody would guess, Tahiti is a beautiful place whose splendor is rivalled by very few locations on Earth, but Fletcher and the others know that even in a remote island like this, british authorities would eventually come for them and they would be hanged for piracy. This is why the crew decided to come to Pitcairn Island, many miles southeast of tahiti, and guarded by coral reefs. Even now, the wrecks of many ships can be seen around the island, a testament to the perils of its surrounding rock formations. Fletcher took some useful items from the Bounty, then sank the ship so the royal navy couldn't trace him. 150 years later, the descendants of Fletcher and the other crewmen still live on the island, having never seen a proper civilization. The islands only village is Adamstown, precariously placed on a ledge over the ocean. Many of the houses on pitcairn are made of ship parts. Although they are related to the original settlers who came on the Bounty, the people living on the island today look very different as a result of inbreeding and ethnic mixing between Europeans and tahitians. William Christian, great grandson of Fletcher, is shown working the fields. The village blacksmith still uses smithing items that came from the Bounty a century and a half earlier. We learn that despite being isolated from every civilization on earth, the residents of pitcairn follow Christianity after it was introduced to them by John Adams; the Bounty's only survivor. After a baby on the island falls ill, volunteers take turns lighting a flaming beacon on the coast all night so that a passing ship might notice it. It seems unbelievable, but a lone ship does actually come across the beacon and sends a doctor to help. And so, life continues on pitcairn island, a place unaffected by the savage nature of the outside world, but was ironically created by an act of violence that occurred on a ship very long ago. This is a pretty nice short. It's kind of hypocritical how the narrator tends to gloss over Bligh's oppressiveness which caused the revolt in the first place and only mentions the "unforgivable crimes" of the sailors, but the facts presented are of great importance to history. The islanders have in their possession priceless relics taken from the ship, things that would be worth a king's ransom to any self-respecting museum, but the islanders care little about their monetary value. Everything they could ever want is already on the island. Access to technology may be exciting, but as anyone today knows, it has led to all sorts of problems. Many would give anything to live in a place like pitcairn, secluded from society. I probably wouldn't want to live there, but it's fun to visit.

The film is an interesting look at Pitcairn Island... however it inaccurately portrays the religious beliefs of the islanders.

The narrator refers to them as followers of "The Church of England" and that "Sunday is the holiest of days" to the islanders, but in the 1890's the islanders converted to the Seventh-day Adventist church which observes Saturday as the Sabbath.

Most Pitcairn residents have now given up Christianity altogether, but they still observe Saturday as a day of rest.

This is either a case of bad research by the filmmakers or a willful omission.

The American production code, instituted in 1934, dealt with lots of things besides sex in motion pictures. It didn't allow men of the cloth to be portrayed negatively, nor business men to appear greedy, nor did it allow the glorification of armed rebellion. So, besides prudishness, there must have been more than just a little fear during this stage of the Great Depression that the starving American people might start another revolution.

"Mutiny on the Bounty" did not really paint the idea of rebellion in a positive light, but it did paint British naval justice in a rather harsh light. Men who didn't rebel and returned to England were tried for treason and the actual mutineers sailed away to Pitcairn Island, never to face any judicial repercussions for their acts.

Too late to make a long story short, maybe that is why this interesting and informative little short about Pitcairn Island in 1935 gets so preachy - to make up for the rather libertine message of MOTB. It talks about how the inhabitants of Pitcairn Island are all descendants of the mutineers and their islander wives. Thus you have things like one interesting wedding announcement that says "Mr. X Christian will be married to Miss Y Christian on Saturday. Let anybody who has reason why these two should not be wed report to the registry office." It shows one girl getting water from a well and mentions that the vase she is using is actually from the Bounty itself.

Then it oddly starts going into the ill effects that all of the inbreeding has had on the descendents of the mutineers and somehow tries to make this the "sins of the fathers", talking about "their evil deed" of mutiny. Funny how no mention is made of the cruelty of Captain Bligh who brought on their rebellion.

Finally it mentions how Mr. Christian, leader of the mutineers spent his final years sullen, alone, and unhappy. Hey, with half of the islanders seemingly named "Christian" he couldn't have been THAT unhappy or alone! I'd recommend this short. Just try to ignore the preaching and pay attention to the actual facts revealed.