• Part I: Handsy Patron at Black Joe’s (Uncredited)
• Part II: Clearly Visible James Cagney

I’m not the only one who’s noticed that the clearly visible James Cagney isn’t clearly visible in “Mutiny on the Bounty.” More and more people have questioned it. One guy decided to do his own deep dive and claims to have found Cagney, less than clearly visible, sure, and not exactly off Catalina Island, per the original story, but 1) on the deck of the Bounty in port; and 2) in a tavern. He posted his detective work to his YouTube channel, circling the find(s): 

On the Bounty

During a transition scene at a pub

I assume he’s well-meaning, but damn I miss gatekeepers.

A suspect James Cagney credit, corrected or left to linger, doesn’t matter in the long run, but it is indicative of a larger problem. We’ve created two repositories of facts, pre- and post-internet, and the latter has the field and is winning the day. Until the internet came around, nobody claimed that James Cagney was in “Mutiny on the Bounty,” but that mistake, or joke, or lark, has persisted because people want things to be true and entities like IMDb can’t be bothered to fact-check. Essentially, the one thing I want for IMDb—to be a solid repository of film history—isn’t what it wants for itself.

Soon, of course, it won’t be pre- and post-internet facts we’re wrangling over but pre- and post-AI facts. Reality will become more and more malleable. The grifters who pulled off this one will digitally insert Cagney into clips, and entities like IMDb will go along because there’s no money in correcting it; and maybe because IMDb will be all AI, too. Maybe it already is.

When the internet age began in the mid-90s, writers and editors like myself realized, with something like joy, that mistakes that lived on in print didn’t have to live on in this other realm. Mistakes could be corrected! It took longer to realize there was another path.