Lean Machine

At the end of the month, the DVD shipping system of Netflix will be shut down.  After years of disks arriving by mail in red envelopes, I will be left with only a hodgepodge of streaming services to access movies.  This is a real loss, since the Netflix DVDs were the best way to view obscure and old movies.  Streaming services show new releases, of course, but their selection of low-demand titles is very limited.  This development has already caused me to adjust my film watching habits, since I now have resorted to buying DVDs from online stores.  One arrived just yesterday: David Lean's Oliver Twist.

 The famous director David Lean, known for cinematic masterpieces such as Bridge on the River Kwai, and Doctor Zhivago, early in his career also made two films that were adaptations of Charles Dickens novels.  Oliver Twist was released in 1948, and starred a very young Alec Guiness.  Two years earlier, Lean directed Great Expectations which also featured Guiness.  Both films are often included in various lists of "100 Best British Films".  Since there are literally dozens of movie versions of any given Dickens novel, I could (and perhaps will) make it a lifelong hobby to view each one.  But I will start with Lean's version of Oliver Twist, which Dickens wrote as a young newlywed while living in a house that is now a museum, which I visited a few years ago.

Lean's work intersects with my life and interests in several instances.  For example, his classic Doctor Zhivago was released the year I was born and won several Academy Awards.  But late in life, Lean began a project to make a film based on what is one of my lifelong favorite books: Mutiny on the Bounty, by Charles Nordhoff and James Norman Hall.  In the late 1970s, he was doing the type of work necessary prior to filming a contemporary film about the 1789 mutiny.  He had scouted locations for shooting, and had begun the process of having a replica of the Bounty ship built.  Unfortunately for theater goers, Lean dropped out of the project when fundraising difficulties arose.  The film was ultimately made by a production company founded by Dino De Laurentiis.  It was released in 1984 and featured Mel Gibson and Anthony Hopkins.   Despite an all-star cast and the most historically accurate Bounty replica ever used in film, the movie was not an overwhelming box office success.  One wonders what it might have been under Lean's direction.

The fate of Bounty replicas also fascinates me.  I know almost nothing about the ship used for the 1932 mutiny film starring Clark Gable and Charles Laughton.  But I know quite a bit about the Bounty built for the 1962 film starring Marlon Brando and Trevor Howard.  That replica was built for the film in Lunenberg, Nova Scotia using traditional wooden ship building techniques.  She was built significantly larger than the original ship, in order to accommodate the MGM film crew.  After use in the '62 film, the ship appeared in various other movies, and was a tourist attraction docked in St. Petersburg, FL.  The vessel was maintained on an irregular schedule, alternating between neglect and major refits.  She received her last maintenance in Boothbay Harbor, Maine in October 2012,  Weeks later while returning to Florida, she sank in hurricane Sandy off the coast of Cape Hatteras, North Carolina.

The Bounty replica used in the '84 film was the most historically faithful of all the major film ships.  This, even though she was built in New Zealand with a steel hull.  Her overall dimensions and wood fittings were closely based on original plans found in English archives.  After the film, the ship saw little use and was home ported in Australia as a tourist attraction.  More recently, the ship has been purchased by a Hong Kong corporation, and her current location and occupation are unclear.