Some More Bounty For Tahiti

A special-charter South Pacific Air Lines Super-Constellation, temporarily named “Bounty”, brought to Tahiti in mid-November the final complement of actors and technicians for the new MGM production of the film “Mutiny on the Bounty”.

ABOARD was British actor Hugh Griffin, who won a Best Actor award in the USA for his role as a sheik in Ben Hur. He will play the part of one of the mutineers, Alexander Smith, who helped found the colony on Pitcairn Island, and died at a ripe old age under the pseudonym of John Adams.

Also aboard the Bounty was British actor Noel Purcell, star of Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, who arrived looking like an old sea-dog, with a fine crop of whiskers.

Newly arrived in Tahiti is Morgan Hutgens, MGM’s Director of Pub licity, and top publicity picture man Eric Carpenter.

Marlon Brando, who will take the star role of Christian, arrived in Tahiti in early November and has rented a beautiful beach home in the Punaauia residential district.

The total of the MGM personnel brought to Tahiti is well over 100.

Many Tahitian male actors, extras, musicians and dancers have been growing their hair long in these past two months, and are hid ing their abundant locks beneath handsome Tahitian hand-made hats with colourful shell-woven hat bands.

The entire village of Tautira, in the Peninsula district (Tahiti-Iti), has been employed for the past three months in the construction of 70-ft long, double outrigger canoes for use in the film.

Shooting—from a huge pineapple barge shipped from Hawaii to

Tahiti —began on November 28 at the neighbouring island of Bora Bora, with the first sequences film ing a Tahitian stone-fishing festival in which the entire village took part.

The arrival of the 110-ft, exact replica of the original Bounty, made in Nova Scotia—and five weeks en route to Tahiti—and the completion of MGM’s “native village” at Point Venus. Tahiti, herald the beginning of a six to eight months’ shooting schedule.

Complains a coconut plantation owner: “I used to be able to get my trees aluminium-banded against rats and land-crabs for 5 francs apiece. Now I offer 10 francs —and 20 francs — and nobody’s interested. . . They are all working for MGM!”

Missing from this Tahiti scene is Louis Aitamai (Bobo), who has taken a troup of local dancers, singers and musicians on a two months’ trip to Suva, Sydney and New Zealand.

Their revue, financed by the Societe des Mers du Sud, is en titled, Une Nuit a Tahiti (A Night in Tahiti).

Songs in the show will be recorded and made into an album by Tahiti’s Eddie Lund, and future plans in clude a tour of Japan and the Philippines.

Singing star Loma, and dancers Liliane, Jeanette, Tukua, Teumere and Fifi, cried when they left Tahiti.