‘You know Mutiny on the Bounty almost made me a drunk and a tramp. It was disgusting. But I survived. I survived and made myself a promise that however poor I got I would never again do anything I didn’t really believe in.’
As subsequent events would prove, Harris did not live up to his declaration. But at that early stage in his career such a statement - matched by many other assessments of his time on the Bounty - required some courage. Hollywood was still all-powerful in the world of celluloid and the brief intervention of the independent film on centre stage was still some years away.
Later, looking back with the benefit of hindsight, he said:
I caused problems on only one movie in my life. During Mutiny on the Bounty I stood up to Marlon Brando at a time when the industry cowed and crumbled before him. I called him a gross misconceived bloody animal. That was a legendary row and it has lived with me ever since.
At the time it was an extraordinary thing to do on a production, in which Brando, the actor, was dictating the course of events, and directors and producers were indeed either unwilling or unable to take on the box office star. That a little-known supporting actor from Limerick would barrel in where the big shots feared to tread said something about either the toughness of Harris’s character or his arrogance. Either way, one of the so-called Hollywood screen greats held no fear for him.
His stance earned the admiration of the veteran Irish actor Noel Purcell, who was witness to the unfolding internal drama on the set of the movie in Tahiti. When he finished shooting his role and returned to Dublin, he told reporters that Harris and Trevor Howard were angered by the prima donna behaviour of the star, but added that he was sure in the end a very good film would emerge. He added: ‘Take it from me folks, Dickie Harris is going to be a star after this.’
But even John Huston, when asked what it was like working with Harris, said: ‘The next time I read he has caused problems on a film, I’ll be forced to believe it’s because the director or producer hasn’t done his homework.’
The film has become legendary for Brando’s behaviour during filming, which led to director Carol Reed’s departure and then caused confrontations with his successor Lewis Milestone. Richard Harris was the third lead after Brando and Trevor Howard and, in common with other cast members, was outraged by Brando’s inability or refusal to remember lines and his constant meddling with the script, which created further insecurity.
Harris said later: ‘The picture and Brando were a large dreadful nightmare for me and I would prefer to forget both as soon as my nerves recover.’
Brando, preparing for the scene of Fletcher Christian’s death, lay on blocks of ice for intervals of several minutes in order to simulate the burns of the victim. Harris refused to act opposite Brando and he performed to a log. When Brando wanted to film his own close-ups, Harris threw the log down and said: ‘Let him talk to this.’
Harris’s initial instinct had been to turn down the part when it was first offered to his agent. He felt the part of mutineer John Mills was too small, but a later draft of the script had given the character a higher profile and more screen time. He still was not sure, even after he was offered a bigger financial incentive.
He must have been playing a game when he requested equal billing with the star Brando or alternatively with Trevor Howard. It was pure brinkmanship for the sake of it. If equal billing was appearing third on the poster and credits in same-size type then he did get his way, an achievement in itself. Producer Aaron Rosenberg replied that Trevor Howard was better known; Harris’s riposte was that he was better known than Howard was at the same age of 30.
The producer was no pushover. A former All American football player who after college worked for fifteen years as an assistant director at Twentieth Century Fox studios, he had graduated to producer in the early 1950s. He had produced box office hits The Glenn Miller Story (1953) and The Benny Goodman Story (1955) and had a reputation as a straight talker and for bringing in films on time and on budget.
Rosenberg then sat on his hands and employed silence, his lack of response bringing out sweat on Harris’s forehead. It was beginning to appear that he might have gone a bridge too far and for no good tactical advantage or financial reason, as he wasn’t driven by the money but by the opportunity to work with Brando, his acting hero. As the weeks crept towards the production date start, 15 October, Harris was convinced that it was all over. The producer waited until the last minute and agreed to the terms. Within a day Harris was on his way to Tahiti.
MGM had hired Carol Reed, the accomplished director of The Third Man, to do a remake of the 1935 version with a $5 million budget and twelve-week location shoot in Tahiti, with the rest of the scenes completed at the studios of the production company.
Shooting was scheduled to begin in October 1961, but right from the off things started to go wrong. When the cast arrived at the location - for Harris it involved a trip of over 9,000 miles - the technical end of the production was way behind. The vessel representing the ship HMS Bounty, which had been brought from Canada, was not ready. There were 7,000 native extras to be trained for participation and, when filming on location, there is always the problem of the weather affecting continuity: the Pacific was no exception. In the classic tradition of Hollywood, the script was being rewritten on a daily basis, further complicated by the fact that the lead had been given script approval in his contract.
Harris, who had travelled alone to Tahiti, was accommodated in a basic hut. In the evenings Harris, Howard and members of the crew drank in local taverns, and for those thus inclined there was a surfeit of beautiful young girls only too happy to get involved with members of the production, who under normal schedules would not have had the time or energy to be so distracted.
It would be fair to say that whatever money Carol Reed was on, it would not compensate for the myriad and rapidly oncoming problems that were to stalk the production. The weather became unpredictable; rain and tempests appeared from nowhere. Many scenes had to be reshot and many were delayed while waiting for good and consistent light. There were problems with the ship, which had been built for authenticity but creaked and groaned under the weight of technical equipment and personnel, making its sailing pattern and balance difficult to stabilise.
The director was becoming increasingly frustrated by the antics of the leading actor. Right from the beginning, Brando had resisted the director’s intention to rehash the 1935 version. He managed to persuade Reed to have the script rewritten. Eric Ambler was brought on board to do the job but Brando was not immediately impressed, hence the constant redrafting. Soon Ambler was doing the fourteenth draft, a nice job as he was on a retainer of $3,000 a week. Not only was Brando foostering around with the script but he was also displaying a curious inability to either learn or remember his lines. That also got to Harris, who remarked: ‘He doesn’t play a scene with you. Everything is a secret. He doesn’t pour on the coal in the first take but lets it go on to the eleventh and suddenly it clicks for him and he walks off. Meanwhile your best take may have been there. It is a self-centred sort of art.’
Brando, who was once a hero and motivating force for the Irish actor, particularly in relation to method acting, now became a source of irritation and annoyance because Harris rightly was coming to the conclusion that Brando’s method was entirely self-serving and in no circumstance could he be considered a team player. He was more concerned about playing a political game against the studio bosses who, the way the production was going, would be looking for someone to blame and Harris would be a prime target.
For Harris, it was a disillusioning experience. One of the main reasons he had taken the part was the chance to act with Brando: ‘I was being invited to star with Marlon fucking Brando. All his pictures - right back to the stuff like The Men and On The Waterfront - were the reasons why I wanted to act and survive as an actor.’ What Harris had accepted as the example of the great American art of acting now looked distinctly more like artifice.
He was being exposed early on in his career to the worst aspects of the Hollywood studio system. For Harris, it was an experience that would not easily be forgotten and would induce in him a well-justified cynical attitude. If you wanted the money, just take it and run; if you cared, well that would just invite trouble.
However, the Limerick-born actor was not then, or at any time, fazed about ‘trouble’. His instinct was to stand up against and talk about anything that was thrown in his path. It was a characteristic that would mark him out as a man who would take on any challenge put in his way, without fear and seeking no favour.
Richard Harris would prove, as he did on the field for Crescent College or Garryowen, that he would go for the line, come what may. The celluloid arena would be no different in that regard, whether it be in the top echelons of Hollywood or the mean field of small independent production. It was not just a matter of arrogance, of which he was not devoid, but also intellect. Despite the paucity of his conventional education he was hugely well-read and acquainted with the proper provenance of his profession. His understanding of what he was doing was well founded, deeply thought out and underscored by basic instinct. His fondness for life’s pleasures and attraction for the camaraderie of drinking would not and could not diminish his formidable intelligence.
Of course, like any man who might have experienced in his youth the height of the success of his father and the relative ignominy of the failure of the family business, he could have something to prove in the realm of generational retrieval of success. But such naked ambition could be too easily ascribed to such simplistic origin. There was a lot more to Richard Harris than that. More a person determined to be his own man and, temporarily at least, to rid himself of the shackles of the past. There is no son born who would not aspire to such status.
But during the shoot there was an ominous reminder of his past:
When I was doing Mutiny on the Bounty my father called and asked me when I was coming back to see him. ‘Come on now, the next one might take me,’ he said. I asked my brother: ‘What does that mean?’ And he told me: ‘He has had a couple of heart attacks since you left.’ So I planned with Elizabeth to go back and then I got the call that he had died.
The production, meanwhile, moved from one stuttering crisis to another and the constant problems and delays began to eat through the budget at an alarming rate. Back in Culver City, California, at the headquarters of MGM, Aaron Rosenberg must have longed for the days of his earlier successes as the biggest film of his producing career transformed into an unrelenting nightmare. He had hardly had a wink of sleep for months as he tried to put out one technical or creative fire after another.
Carol Reed, weary of the constant battles off the set, wanted to leave but instead Rosenberg fired him. It was a strange move, because if the British director had left of his own accord or desire he would not have been entitled to any further payment, which could have saved the studio some of the money that the production was haemorrhaging daily. By firing Reed, MGM had to honour his contract, which cost them $200,000 - and then hire a new director and pay him.
Ironically, Brando, Harris, Howard and many others were sorry to see Reed go, as he was generally considered a decent man who had entered a creative lion’s den with no conception of the awful difficulties that would arise. He was replaced by Lewis Milestone, who some years before had directed the war classic All Quiet on the Western Front.
Brando, meanwhile, had become romantically involved with a native beauty, Tarita, who had been cast as his girlfriend in the film.
It was not long before the new director began to be affected by the general malaise on the film, a lot of it generated by the star. Milestone said later:
I knew that we were going to have a stormy passage right away. I like to get on with things, but Brando likes to discuss every scene, every line for hours. I felt enough time had been wasted, but time did not seem to mean anything to Brando. He argued about every scene. When eventually the arguments were over, I’d be told that he was ready for the cameras. It was a terrible way to make a picture.
There is a story about an episode between Brando and Harris that may sound like a midshipman’s myth but is more than plausible. The script called for Brando to hit Harris and knock him into a camp fire. After delivering his lines he tapped Harris lightly on his cheek but Harris refused to fall down. He told the director that he would fall when Brando hit him hard enough to make it look real. Brando again took the light touch, so Harris went over to him, kissed him on the cheek and asked him if he wanted to dance. Apparently Brando was enraged and both refused to be on set together, the star shooting his scenes opposite a stand-in while Harris performed to a box. Milestone sensibly kept his distance. On the last day of the studio shoot Brando asked for Harris and requested he give his lines one last time but Harris refused and offered him the box he played to, adding insult to injury by commenting that Brando would get as much out of the box as Harris himself had got out of Brando.
The scene had to be abandoned. Later, over a drink, Harris told Howard that he should not be walked on by Brando. The patience and tolerance shown by the British actor subscribed to the Robert Mitchum school of acting rather than the famous and at times infamous Method academy. It was confirmed in a scene between Bligh and Christian in which Bligh did most of the talking. It should have been over in a few takes, as Howard, although a great drinker in his off time, was a thorough professional when it came to being on set. But Brando continually fluffed his few lines, forcing the director to do eight takes until Brando decided to play ball. But Howard kept his cool for the good reason that he knew well what the outcome would be if he lost it - twenty takes. He had been warned before taking the part that Brando would attempt to run the picture and it did not take long for confirmation.
Yet it wasn’t all bad for Harris. Elizabeth had arrived with their son Damian and the news that she was pregnant, and they made the best of the rudimentary accommodation and entertained people they befriended on set. He also had an offer for a part in a small budget film to be helmed by first-time director Lindsay Anderson, based on a book by author David Storey entitled This Sporting Life.
He loved the book but was not happy with the script, which had been adapted by Storey. Nevertheless, whatever its shortcomings it provided welcome relief from the troubles on the Bounty. As he put it: ‘I was in a state of absolute desperation at the time, what with Brando’s behaviour and the film dragging on interminably. I didn’t know where to turn, Suddenly I got this novel and I was a new man. I had a tremendous affinity with it but the first script was terrible.’
Harris made copious notes on the story and persuaded Anderson to fly out to Tahiti and work on the script. After a number of weeks they had, according to Harris, pulled it into shape. Anderson was deeply impressed with the actor’s intellect and his instinct about creative matters. For Harris it was a godsend, enabling him to block out the terrible realties of Bounty and see light at the end of the tunnel. Already the film had run £10 million over budget and was six months over schedule.
Relief came in January 1961 when the production moved back to Los Angeles to complete the indoor scenes. The Harris family were accommodated in an air-conditioned hotel, which was sheer luxury compared to the previous months. The claustrophobic atmosphere and heat of Tahiti was gone and for the most part the lid had been lifted from the steaming cauldron. The ill-fated film ploughed on.
Milestone threw in the towel and was replaced by a studio director of no flair, named George Seaton. At this stage, the number of writers engaged on the project had exceeded nine or ten. Reshoots in Tahiti resumed and went on from March until the middle of the summer. Elizabeth and Damian went back to London.
In October 1962, a year on from the beginning of the saga, Harris was at last finished with the picture. Brando defended himself against media reports that cast him as the main destructive influence on the mishaps that had beset the film’s production. He claimed that there had been no script and the reason for big failures such as this all came from the same origin. He then became a target, in his view, of studio executives trying to cover up their own mistakes.
There may have been some truth in the assertion that the studio was leaking negative stories about Brando towards the end, anticipating the disaster that all expected Mutiny on the Bounty to be - and the executives were getting in first on who was to blame. Clearly all the blame could not be apportioned to the notoriously difficult actor, but he shouldered a lot. The idea that there was no script was ludicrous, there had to be a script, but it was not one that Brando approved of, and it did not have an angle and storyline that the leading actor and Carol Reed agreed upon.
MGM was at the time and had been for generations the very essence of the Hollywood film factory, churning out entertainment for the masses at an alarming rate. The cast, of course, was important but actors were just one element of the production line, highly prized for a time and highly dispensable in another. The ghosts of the founding studio father, Louis B. Mayer, and the famous producer Irving Thalberg still walked the studio headquarters at Culver City and their legacy was still predominant in the ethos of MGM.
Thalberg died tragically young after a great blossoming of his career had produced the 1935 version of the film that starred Charles Laughton as Bligh and Clark Gable as Fletcher Christian. In choosing Carol Reed as director, the studio was signalling that it wanted a straight remake, but by bowing to market imperative by going for the most bankable actor with Brando it ensured, unknowingly perhaps, that this was not going to happen.
Worse still, from the studio perspective Brando had an abiding hatred of the system and culture of film-making established by the likes of Mayer. It insulted every fibre of his creative being. Reed, however, was from the old school and would not have empathised. Richard Harris was representative of a new and emerging breed of actor about to replace the English ancient regime of Olivier and Gielgud - and neither could he empathise.
The fact was that, whatever the shortcomings of the producers or scriptwriters, Brando made a strong contribution to the nightmarish experience of the production, which of course had other aspects to contend with, such as the weather which was out of human control. Brando’s assertion that they should have known about the weather was laughable.
There are some creative projects that are cursed and it appeared that Mutiny on the Bounty, like Apocalypse Now years later, was one of them. The expectations for the film were nil, but despite some indifferent reviews it would miraculously prove a commercial success and garner Academy Award nominations. Within weeks of release the film had grossed over $30 million, occupying sixth position in the best earners of the year. All the pain suddenly seemed to have been worth it.
In spite of all Harris’s misgivings, he received good notices and the film would have no negative impact on his career. In fact, the opposite. He was up on the posters with Brando and Trevor Howard and his name associated with a successful Hollywood movie. The worst aspects of the film’s making ensured him a place in celluloid folklore, with the Irish actor admired for his guts in standing up to Tinselstown’s biggest and most awkward name.
Elizabeth had given birth to a second son, Jared, on 24 August 1961 and Harris was embarking on a project that he felt passionate about and in which he would take centre stage. Domestically all was in order, and Harris was driven and full of new ideas and new projects beyond This Sporting Life, which would be his film as much as Bounty had been Brando’s, with the difference that the script would be set, polished and signed off before the camera rolled.
After returning to London he went on to Dublin first and then Limerick. There he would witness the final disintegration of the family business. It was a sad conclusion for his father, who did not live to see his son personally retrieve the success that had once been the mark of the Harris milling operation.