Captain Horatio Hornblower

Beat To Quarters!

It's fun, it's exciting, and it looks fabulous at times, it is however far from being a great movie. In the absence of Errol Flynn, Gregory Peck steps in to Hornblower's shoes and as much as he gives it his all (rumoured to have been one of his favourite performances), it's a spot of miscasting that thankfully doesn't kill the picture dead, he's just sadly a tad too straight laced to really make the role work. The same can be said for the casting of Virginia Mayo as Lady Barbara Wellesley, pretty as she is, it's an odd bit of casting that never quite comes off, yet as daft as it may sound, neither case of miscasting hurts the picture, and this comes down to the astute direction from Raoul Walsh.

The pace never flags ...

This is effectively three short stories bolted together as Raoul Walsh creates quite an exciting and enjoyable seafaring story based around the Napoleonic Wars. Gregory Peck takes the lead role as the eponymous, rather stiff-necked, Royal Navy captain carrying out a mission to provision a rather unreliable ally with arms and munitions. When events in a Europe being terrorised by Napoleon take a series of more treacherous turns, he must now battle his way across the Atlantic and return to help protect his country from the French. Virginia Mayo provides the love interest and Robert Beatty and a feisty James Robertson Justice work well too, to help keep the ship off the rocks as the battle comes down to tactics and becomes personal! It is a go...