Under the Bam, the Boo

World War II temporarily demolished South Pacific islands with such ambrosial names as Kwajalein and Bougainville, but it remained for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer to polish off the most magical landmark in the ocean--Tahiti. All but shooting money out of flamethrowers, M-G-M is there to remake Mutiny on the Bounty. The invading actors and technicians have gone native. The natives have gone nuts.

Shooting will probably extend into summer, with M-G-M spending $23,000 a day and blurring the island economy in a gilded whirl. The company has rented 1,000 outrigger canoes, hired 3,000 extras, and built a complete 18th century Tahitian village at Point Venus. The new version of the Bounty story will go farther than the 1935 film, following the mutineers to Pitcairn Island and tracing their lives there down to the last survivor.

Tahitians found their way quickly to the new subtreasuries of paradise. A man whose property bordered the M-G-M village littered the area with furniture and red flags, spoiling the cinematic background until M-G-M paid him off. Tipping, hitherto unknown in the Society Islands, is now tribal custom. And the celebrated free love of the Societies is no longer free. Where, once upon a very good time, a lover would present his vahine (island girl) with an ordinary nail--or, more recently, a dress, a bottle of perfume, perhaps a bicycle--money now serves.

$800,000 Prop. MGM, prepared for almost all problems, showed up with huge cargoes of cork gravel so that the sound track would not be spoiled by actors' feet crunching into the real thing, also 500 plastic breadfruit leaves, since the native variety wilts under klieg lights. Wigs cover native crew cuts, and one assistant director has to go around telling the vahines to take off their lipstick before each day's shooting begins. One studio technician, armed with crates of thin, circular, skin-colored pads, is the ultimate in Hollywood specialists; every day he sees to it that roughly 1,500 bosoms are covered so skillfully that they look uncovered, presumably satisfying both censors and audiences.

To the Tahitians at least, the major M-G-M attraction is an $800,000 prop that rides at anchor in Papeete Harbor, spreads 10,000 sq. ft. of canvas each day to go to sea as H.M.S. Bounty, trailed by a Hawaiian pineapple barge loaded with cameras, cameramen and flunkies. An amateur pharmacist's mate passes out 400 Dramamine pills a week. Larger than the original ship (110 ft. v. 90 ft.), the new Bounty, built in Nova Scotia, is an excellent replica, but belowdecks has the sort of 20th century equipment that is unconducive to mutiny--air conditioning, radar, hot running water--and may turn the present Captain Bligh (Trevor Howard) into a captain blithe.

Favoring Gods. MGM's 105-man crew, headed by Director Sir Carol Reed, has spread itself out in grass shacks along a ten-mile stretch of coastline, where some are so content that they may remain forever. Off by himself on the edge of the great lagoon lives Marlon Brando, usually barefoot, wearing shorts and a T shirt, with a flower behind his ear. Although he reads Dylan Thomas aloud on the beach and pays $28 a week for his airmailed Sunday New York Times, the natives love and honor him as the great northern champion of pidgin English.

Frustrating at first was the search for a leading lady to lure Fletcher Christian Brando, in T. S. Eliot's words, "under the bam, under the boo, under the bamboo tree." Then one day a supple vahine named Tarita broke into spontaneous dance before Brando and Director Reed, swayed sensually to the rhythm of sharkskin drums, and extolled Brando's prowess as a godlike lover and drinker of awa, a local fermentation. Brando and Reed conferred. Soon the coconut radios of Tahiti were spreading the message that Tarita had become Hollywood's newest star.

Some Tahitians, however, are ready to mutiny against Bounty. Compounded of residual anti-Americanism in the French-held islands and simple jealousy on the part of those not in on the gold flow, the anti-Hollywood sentiment came leaping from the pavement one morning in neatly painted signs: M-G-M GO HOME. It was the work of a resident artist who had been turned down for a job with the M-G-M crew. When a good part of the M-G-M company recently left Tahiti for a temporary breather in Los Angeles, La Tribune Tahitienne exulted: "The Polynesian gods are favoring us." Not exactly. Back in Hollywood, the Polynesian gods were planning second and third waves of invasion that should push the cost of the film past the $15 million spent on Ben Hur, and eventually turn Tahiti into an offshore subdivision of Malibu.

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