Captain Horatio Hornblower

I've recently convinced my brother to start reading the Hornblower books, and he seems to be enjoying them so far! So when sanguinity pointed out that the 1951 film adaptation Captain Horatio Hornblower, starring Gregory Peck as the title character, is based on books I'd already read, I thought I'd suggest watching a Hornblower film as a fun family holiday activity when I saw my brother over Christmas.

It was good fun seeing Hornblower and all the action of the books on screen! I'm not really quite familiar enough with the actual details of a sailing ship to visualise everything in the books very successfully, and in a way I think this helped. And there is a pleasing amount of the sort of swashbuckling that works well on screen. However:

So, the film is based on the first three books by publication order—The Happy Return, A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours—but this is a bit of a misleading statement. What actually happens is that the first ~two-thirds is a reasonably faithful if condensed adaptation of The Happy Return, and (just when we seem to have reached something like an ending) we then move onto a tiny bit of A Ship of the Line before whizzing through a highly condensed Flying Colours in the last twenty minutes or so. The pacing is as a result rather strange and confusing. Brother had read part of The Happy Return and not either of the other two and definitely found it tricky to follow; I think I'd have been pretty lost if I hadn't known the books.

And I'm not sure why the filmmakers were so determined to include A Ship of the Line and Flying Colours, because they carefully removed all the good stuff from the bits that are included—most importantly the Hornblower/Bush slashiness and hurt/comfort. Bush doesn't even lose his leg, for goodness' sake! He gets shot in the leg, he seems to be a bit hurt, but then he gets better and the leg is completely fine and there's no anguished womanly hand-holding, no Hornblower having to watch his best friend go through the agony of an amputation, suffer terribly and almost die while in captivity, no learning to walk again on a dashingly piratical wooden leg, did I mention no fraught tender hand-holding or anything??? The romantic Loire boating holiday is not dwelt on lovingly at all, and Brown is replaced by a random OC sailor for no reason. This plot is as badly mutilated as Bush's leg isn't. To be fair the film does also cut out the worst part of Flying Colours, viz. the Marie affair, but that's kind of almost a bad thing too, because...

...I think the worst failing of this film is that it removes everything weird, messed-up, unconventional and generally distinctive about Hornblower and tries to turn him into a generic model hero. Some of this was certainly intentional, and some of it seems like the inevitable result of seeing Hornblower from outside rather than being in his head all the time, because so much of his messed-up-ness in the books is internal. So we don't get any of his variously dysfunctional/unsatisfied/self-loathing internal thoughts; the Hornblower-Barbara-Maria triangle is simplified and Hornblower/Barbara flattened into a far more conventional romance with a far more straightforwardly happy ending than is possible with book!Hornblower; there can be no difficult bad-idea relationships with any other women like Marie; and of course there can be no suspiciously anguished hand-holding or boating holiday cuddling with Bush either. Everything about the film is just made so much more acceptable, all the weird rough edges of the books sanded off; even El Supremo is more of an entertaining pantomime villain and much less genuinely horrifying than he was in the book.

So that is my first foray into Hornblower adaptations, and I am not on the whole very impressed. I hope to watch the TV series when I've read a few more books, and I'll see what I make of that...