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The second version of Mutiny got under way when an MGM expedition arrived on Tahiti at the height of the rainy season. It had to run before the weather and go back later for another try. The first of the thirty scripts to be completed by five writers, including Eric Ambler and Charles Lederer, was meantime coming hot off the typewriters.
Life on French Tahiti, where society is very proper and the caste system very strong, livened up considerably when Marlon debarked. He unearthed a series of hide-outs to which he would retire when the mood came upon him. On bad days hours would roll by while messengers tracked him down so that filming could resume.
His taste in girls has always been off-beat, from the Hindu impersonator, Anna Kashfi, whom he married and divorced; through the fisherman’s daughter, Josanne Mariana-Berenger, to a barefoot waitress whom he found on Tahiti.
The first major casualty among the company was Oscar-winning Hugh Griffith, who was eased off the island by the French authorities after some spectacular high jinks. Another Briton, Sir Carol Reed, hired to direct, was replaced when it developed that he saw Captain Bligh as the hero, not Fletcher Christian. At the speed at which he was shooting, it would have taken years to finish the picture.
Sir Carol had also made the basic error of believing that when he told Marlon to do something in front of the camera, Marlon would obey. Reed was succeeded by Lewis Milestone, director and diplomat, who grew accustomed to handling difficult situations with kid gloves.
There were plenty to handle. The movie makers hit the South Seas like a typhoon. Liquor poured over the island like the Johnstown flood. A French naval lieutenant ran off with the second native lead halfway through filming, so that in one version two girls mysteriously alternated in playing the romantic scenes without a word of explanation being offered.
Marlon at one point was bowled over in a double feature by a popular local infection and a virus, forcing him to take to his bed for three weeks.
Aaron Rosenberg, the producer, couldn’t make a move without being balked and countermanded by cable and telephone from Metro’s front office, where Siegel found his reputation at stake. On Tahiti there was panic at the lack of a script. A succession of writers, concluding with Lederer, worked against the clock to get out scenes, often only one day in advance of shooting, sometimes rewriting lines at lunch time for the afternoon shift.
“In one two-week period we shot only two small scenes,” Richard Harris told me during filming—he came close to stealing the picture as one of the mutineers. “That wasn’t surprising since Brando was constantly demanding that scenes be rewritten. You never knew where the hell you were.” Marlon added his own seasoning to the stew by toying with the idea at one point of abandoning the part of Christian and taking on a different role in the picture.