"PISTOLS AND CUTLASSES, MEN!".(C.S. Forester's "Hornblower")

THE RETURN OF HORNBLOWER

ITV'S NEW HORNBLOWER series, broadcast last year on the ABC, was virtually the first screen version of C.S. Forester's books for nearly fifty years. For fans of the novels, however, Hornblower has never been away. Since the character first appeared in The Happy Return (1937)--known in the USA as Beat to Quarters--quickly followed by A Ship of the Line (1938) and Flying Colours (1939), the books have rarely been out of print. The same is true of the eight further novels that appeared regularly until Forester's death in 1967 while working on Hornblower and the Crisis.

Of course this was in the bookshops and the libraries, not on television or at the movies. Plenty of people want to read the books, but since Captain Hornblower RN (1951) no film-maker wanted to make screen adaptations. Part of the problem was passages like this (from Flying Colours):

 
   Over the horizon to leeward was appearing a long line of ships, 
   closehauled. They were in rigid, regular line, and as Hornblower watched 
   they went about in succession in perfect order, as if they were chained 
   together. The channel fleet was at drill--eighteen years of drill at sea 
   had given them their unquestioned superiority over any other fleet in the 
   world. 

And it gets worse. A Ship of the Line includes the bombardment from the sea of a division of French infantry, a sea fight between a single British ship and four French warships; all fiendishly difficult to recreate with models in the studio tank and ruinously expensive to build full-size. But now producer Andrew Benson and director Andrew Grieve (Lorna Doone, On the Black Hill), with a lot of ingenuity and a $33 million budget, have solved the logistical problems and made a series of four telemovies based on Mr Midshipman Hornblower (1950). Moreover two further films which are in post-production, based on Lieutenant Hornblower, are also to be screened by the ABC.

C.S. Forester's work has been long overdue for this treatment. The Hornblower novels may be set against the background of Britain's maritime war against Napoleon but they portray universal themes of duty and leadership profoundly relevant to a Britain which only a few years ago fought a war with the Argentinians when they invaded the Falklands, or an Australia risking major conflicts with Indonesia over East Timor. For Britain and Australia it was simply a matter of honour--something Hornblower, a man for whom duty is everything, would understand.

Although C.S. Forester's period detail was impeccable, the Hornblower novels were always contemporary. They might be about expeditions to the Baltic in 1812 or an attempt to raise rebellion in the Spanish possessions in the Americas but for the author and his first readers they contain echoes of HMS Cossack, the pursuit of the Graf Spee's supply ship the Altmark, or the threat posed by Hitler, for whom Napoleon was a more than adequate stand-in. This analogy was almost a staple of wartime propaganda in films like Young Mr Pitt (where Robert Donat's Pitt the Younger represents Churchill and Herbert Lom's malignant Napoleon Hitler) or Lady Hamilton with its rousing recreation of Trafalgar--superb models in a huge studio tank with the sea shanty "Hearts of Oak" and Miklos Rozsa's heroic theme on the soundtrack together with Nelson's (Laurence Olivier) a historical denunciation of appeasement.