1951 - CAPTAIN HORATIO HORNBLOWER, pretty good seafaring flick

This is a film version of C. S. Forrester's Hornblower, series about a man who starts out as a teenager and joins the British Navy circa the 1800's.  The books follow Horatio Hornblower through his navel career which ends up with him becoming an admiral.

 Warner Brothers Studios chose to film a Hornblower story with him as a captain taking on the French and a Latin American dictator who calls himself "El Supremo." There are several exciting navel battles recreated with some impressive models and the director Raoul Walsh does his usual good job moving the story along.

Frankly I had my doubts about this film.  For the most part the cast was made almost entirely of British actors.  The film was shot on location in England and France which gave it a reasonable look of authenticity.  My chief worry about this filming was the casting of the leads  Gregory Peck and even more so Virginia Mayo.  Peck is obviously an American playing a British officer but this is Peck at his best.  He could bring a lot of authority to a performance and he actually pulls off his part acting like a British Navel Captain.

 

Virginia Mayo was kind of another story.  A stunning looking actor particularly in color with her flaming red hair, she is American through and through and was very good as the gangster girlfriend of James Cagney in White Heat.  Here she is supposed to play the sister of the Duke of Wellington.  Mayo doesn't even attempt a British accent. However for whatever odd reason she's reasonably effective as a British aristocrat.

 

The selling point for this film are the action scenes.  Walsh and his special effects and production team do an excellent job of staging battles between two ships which when you think about it are essentially just a couple of boats shooting cannons at each other.  Walsh is primarily though of as a director good with westerns and gangster movies but apparently he was also something of an Anglophile. 

The film was written by  C. S. Forester, Ivan Goff, Ben Roberts and Aeneas MacKenzie all seasoned Hollywood professionals. The running time is 117 minutes.