Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.

Pecking Order

Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N.
aka Captain Horatio Hornblower
Directed by Raoul Walsh 
UK/USA/France 1951 
Warner Brothers
Spanish Blu Ray Zone B 

This will be, not much more than a short series of notes on Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. rather than a full blown review because, well, I felt the film was hugely entertaining but don’t have much to say about the cinematography, shot composition or music, to tell the truth. The acting is all excellent but, it’s what you’d expect from a top notch cast like this, working with some very well written dialogue.

Ever since I was a barely conscious child, I remember being impressed by my dad’s bookshelves but three specific sets of books remain in my memory to this day. One was his collection of hardbacks of the main works of Alexandre Dumas, another was a small Mervyn Peak boxed edition and, last but by no means least, his impressive box of C. S Forester’s Hornblower novels. Now, the film and TV shows have been on numerous times over the years on British TV but, I’ve somehow never got around to seeing any of them. For Father’s Day this year I wanted to get him a good Blu Ray transfer of the film starring Gregory Peck as the titular character but, nobody in the UK or the US seem to have put it out in a restored format. But I got one put out in Spain and, I have to say, it’s a fine transfer and has the full English language track on it. 

Forester himself helped somewhat to adapt his stories to the big screen for this one, which is based on three Hornblower tales (two novels and one short story I am told). I don’t know how this one is handled as an adaptation but, in one section where an officer has his leg injured but recovers sufficiently in order to have more adventures later in the movie, well... all my dad said was about this matter was that, in the book, he loses that leg. 

The film starts us with a scene of Hornblower having one of his crew flogged and it shows everything about his character as he takes an officer aside and impresses on him that it’s because that officer threatened the crew member with flogging that he has ordered it so. He personally disagrees with it and thinks it a harsh punishment but needs to uphold the officer’s judgement in the eyes of the men... but that said officer should think twice before lightly referring to this kind of judicial penalty in future. Which says everything, I think, about the kind of man Hornblower is.

And from hereon in it becomes a series of naval adventures where political decisions are enforced with broadside cannon runs and swordfighting. There’s even a love interest in the form of Lady Barbara Wellesley, played by Virginia Mayo, who was something of an afterthought in the casting, it would appear but who handles the role magnificently. Alas, both Hornblower and Wellesley are married to other people but, the film makes that right in the end so they can continue their shipboard romance on the mainland by the end of the movie. 

There are a few other actors of interest such as an early role for Stanley Baker and a character played by Mr. Pastry himself, Richard Hearne. Not to mention uncredited roles for Sam Kydd and Richard Johnson. Perhaps the most striking of the uncredited roles was the captain of a Spanish vessel who swordfights with Hornblower in one scene, played by Christopher Lee, still a few years away from his big break out role in the Hammer films. 

But my biggest surprise in the movie was the presence of James Roberston Justice as seaman Quist. Now I’m used to seeing the hulking, portly presence of Justice in comedy roles as pompous authority figures in films in the Doctor or Carry On series (for instance). In this one he’s a little slimmer than I remember him, doing a different accent but still as lovable a character as he is in his more comedic roles, for sure. I really loved him in this and I think I need to try and track down some more films where he’s playing against type. 

And that’s me done with Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N., I think, other than to note that another great Forrester novel which caused a big splash in Hollywood was Humphrey Bogart’s Oscar winning vehicle The African Queen. Another entertaining movie but, I think this is pretty good too. I remember reading back in the day that Gene Roddenberry’s concept for Star Trek was Hornblower in Space and this movie certainly bears that out, I think. Even the three note motif that the sailors use to pipe the Captain on and off board, sounded vaguely familiar to my ears... and then I realised it’s the same three notes that Roddenberry used on his communicators in the original Star Trek series so, yeah, Hornblower in space indeed. Captain Horatio Hornblower R.N. is a splendid adventure yarn, though and, I’d certainly recommend it to lovers of old Hollywood movies. Very entertaining. 

The Saint’s Return (aka The Saint's Girl Friday)

Saint Louis' Blues

The Saint’s Return
(aka The Saint's Girl Friday)
Hammer/RKO UK 1953
Directed by Seymour Friedman

I’ve remarked more than once that my favourite actor to embody the famous Leslie Charteris character The Saint has always been Louis Hayward. Now that’s alway been on the strength of his performance in the RKO entry The Saint In New York (reviewed by me here). He stopped after one movie and George Sanders took over for a while before Hugh Sinclair pretty much finished the series off (although he was starting to grow into the role I think).  Hayward did, however, return to the character 15 years later in a movie made in England by Hammer Studios, who would soon become quite famous for their horror movie output. Now I don’t recall if I’ve ever seen The Saint’s Return before, which does try to be a continuation of that original film series and, indeed, the film was briefly distributed by RKO for Hammer in the US, under the title The Saint’s Girl Friday.

The film starts off with a high speed car chase as a woman is killed when her car is forced of the road by nefarious bad guys. And when I say high speed car chase I mean a ‘not that fast’ car chase with some obviously sped up footage, in this case. We then find The Saint flying back from the US and Inspector Teal, played here by Charles Victor, receiving a telegram from his American counterpart Inspector Fernack (sadly unseen in this film) to warn him of that fact. When we catch up with Louis Hayward’s soft spoken version of The Saint, he has his valet Hoppy with him (played by Thomas Gallagher) and from him hears the news that his old lady friend who had contacted him to come to England to help her has died, courtesy of the car chase at the opening of the picture.

This news obviously fires up Simon Templar but the brilliance, still, of Hayward’s performance is that this anger at the death of a friend is conveyed mostly by body language only. Hayward remains soft spoken throughout the picture and his rage is a smouldering undercurrent, punctuating the actions of his adventures while he offers opinions and advice to his enemies. This adventure is a pretty standard plot involving gambling IOUs and revenge against the people who killed the lady who brought him to London in the first place. I’ll say no more of the plot here other than it has a kind of neat twist reveal on the secret identity of the ringleader of the mob of gamblers which I actually didn’t see coming. So I should be happy about this, right?

Alas, I wish I could say this is a good movie but it’s actually quite a bad one. And it really shouldn’t be. Hayward seems to just stroll through his performance because, frankly, the script just isn’t as clever or witty as those earlier Saint movies and the action choreography on the few fist fights there are is quite lethargic and neither looks, nor feels, like anyone here is in any danger. Now there are a lot of great British actors and actresses who turn up in minor roles here including such notables as Sydney Tafler, Sam Kydd and the glamourous (as she was then) Diana Dors and this should all be enough to save the day as far as this film is concerned but... it just doesn’t. Doctor Who fans might like to note that there’s even a smallish role for William Russell in the film, going by his real name of Russell Enoch, ten years before his famous role as Ian Chesterton, the first Doctor’s companion, made him a household name for a short while.

Ivor Slaney’s score does it’s best to feel like it’s a ‘proper’ Saint movie and he incorporates the much disputed Webb/Charteris melody which was still in use for Ian Ogilvey’s run on the character in the 1970s but... yeah, the music really doesn’t lift the picture as much as one might like. The film is as short as the more recent of The Saint films prior to this but it still somehow feels somewhat padded and, in some ways, just like watching a TV episode. Indeed, the director of this would go on to work with Hayward again the following year on a TV incarnation of the US Lone Wolf character... I’ve never had the opportunity to see any of the Lone Wolf films or TV shows over here in the UK (no, not the Japanese manga character) but, from what I understand, he’s pretty much another variation on Simon Templar anyway (much like The Falcon was, if memory serves).

This film made me think of Timothy Dalton a bit and the two James Bond films he made. I think Hayward is in the same position as him. Timothy Dalton made only two James Bond films... The Living Daylights (reviewed here) and Licence To Kill (reviewed here). The first of these two was absolutely spectacular and got me back into appreciating the Bond character again... the second of these two was a terrible, terrible movie which actually put me off watching the Bond films for a long time until the wonderful Goldeneye. The point is, although Licence To Kill was an awful film and hard to watch, Dalton was still giving an absolutely solid performance as Bond, he just had a useless script to work with. I think the same thing could be said of Louis Hayward and his two movies for The Saint series. He jump started the franchise with an absolutely brilliant film, The Saint In New York but when he finally came back and did a second one, well, the script and direction just seems to have let him down. I can kinda see why Hammer or RKO have never made this one available on DVD or Blu Ray but, as awful as it is, one of those companies really should have a think about doing a commercial release of this one. It needs to be out there for people to see.

As for me and The Saint... well, I don’t plan on revisiting any of the TV shows anytime soon but I am curious to see what Val Kilmer did with the role in the most recent cinematic version of the character. Before that, though, I’d really like to see the two French movies made in the 1960s so, if anyone knows where I can track down copies of these with English subtitles, please let me know. As for The Saint’s Return... there are much better places to start on in the series than to try and sit through this one.

Island Of Terror

Confounded? Try Silicate!

Island Of Terror (aka Night Of The Silicates)
UK 1966
Directed by Terence Fisher
Odeon Entertainment (for Planet Films) 
Blu Ray Region B

Warning: Slight spoilers but nothing which 
should really diminish your enjoyment of this movie.

One of the things I love about the current Blu Ray and DVD release landscape in the UK is the discovery of movies I really should have been tuned into as a kid but which, somehow, managed to escape me. Such a release is the new UK Blu Ray of the 1966 Terence Fisher movie Island Of Terror. Now Fisher is a director who is probably on the radar of pretty much anyone who’s interested in British movies made in the Science Fiction and Horror genres... most famously for the movies he shot for Hammer films such as Dracula (aka Horror Of Dracula and reviewed by me here) and the excellent Four Sided Triangle (reviewed by me here). He also directed one of my all time favourite British sci-fi/horror tales, The Earth Dies Screaming, which I would recommend to all of my readers and which definitely falls into the realm of what I have often called on here, my much loved ‘comfort horror’ films.

Island Of Terror is, from now on, also one of these much loved comfort horror films I will occasionally reach for but, I should probably warn the faint of heart when it comes to certain people who like to take their horror straight up and as it comes, that it’s also badly written and falls quite comfortably into that realm of cinematic entertainment known as... the unintentionally hilarious movie.

The film starts off with some amazing script outbursts which show the inhabitants of an island village at their harbour, each passing second including samples of dialogue which absolutely highlights how cut off from the world they are, even to the point where ‘the company’ hasn’t even bothered to put phones on the island for the last two years. It’s a smallish community and even the local police force seems to be a force of one - Constable John Harris played by Sam Kydd. We then cut to a scene of some of the most incomprehensible sci-fi techno babble I've heard committed to celluloid, which I’m sure even the scriptwriters probably didn’t understand and made up without any kind of research, as a team of scientists in a secluded manor house on the island start their next experiment involving Strontium 90 and a load of lab equipment. All in a quest to discover the cure for cancer. The pseudo-science dialogue is quite outrageously bad, even for a movie like this, and would have took some rehearsing to get it to roll off the tongue like that, I’ll bet.

We then get a credit sequence where my ears stood up and took note. I’d not consciously heard any other movies scored by this composer except one and, as they music played out, I just had time enough to say to somebody in the room that... this sounds a little like the music to the first Dr. Who And The Daleks movie... before the music credits came up. Music by Malcolm Lockyear with sound effects by Barry Gray, who people will know as the musical team behind that first Dalek movie and, in Barry Gray’s case, the composer of many of the Gerry Anderson TV shows such as Joe 90, Captain Scarlet, Thunderbirds, Space 1999 (Season 1) and the like. So I was quite pleased to be able to identify Lockyear’s trademark style when I’d only ever heard his stuff on that first Dalek film, to my knowledge. That being said, when the music was playing on the menu screen, the other person in the room with me suggested the film must be a comedy, from the sound of the score. Nope, it’s not a comedy... well, not intentionally, anyway, but I’ll come back to this point with the music a little later, I think.

Pretty soon, a man goes into a cave and we hear his screams. When he’s discovered by Sam Kydd and taken to one of the three male main protagonists of the film, Dr. Landers (played by Eddie Byrne), it becomes apparent that the rubbery husk of the remains has somehow had the bones stripped from the body. Oh no! Is it a virus? Landers takes advantage of the only boat a week that leaves (or some such, they really do keep emphasising how cut off the population of the island is at any opportunity) to go to London to enlist the aide of his friend Dr. Stanley, played by the legendary Peter Cushing. Stanly takes Landers to meet the lothario Dr. West (played by Edward Judd) who agrees, along with Dr. Stanley to accompany Dr. Landers back to the island to investigate the body.

But how to get there?

Well, West’s girlfriend Toni (played by the lovely Carole Gray) has a rich father and she secures a helicopter ride back to the island... on condition that she can accompany them. Unfortunately, she only accompanies them to be a paper thin character frequently put in peril, assist exposition and help out with the villagers while the men do all the interesting stuff but... hey ho... that’s what you expect from this kind of movie, I guess. Of course, it then transpires that her father will need the helicopter again the very next morning... so the four of them are dropped off on the island and the helicopter agrees to return in a few days... because it’s really important to the plot that everyone in the audience knows they are cut of from the rest of the world on this island for a number of days, right?

And then, amost immediately, the whole film gets really great and when our intrepid heroes go to investigate the Manor House containing the island’s experimental scientific community... they find them all in an equally dead and rubbery state, their bones sucked from their bodies. It doesn’t take long for our heroes to discover that the scientific experiments to cure cancer inadvertently brought forth a rock based, amoeba like creature with a long tentacle that can sting you and suck the very skeleton from you in a very small amount of time. Oh... so it wasn’t a virus after all then? Okay that’s good.

From here on the film turns into a standard monster combat situation, as our heroes learn in no uncertain terms that the silicates (as they call them) split after they’ve eaten some bones (belonging to the odd horse or human, for instance) and multiply with great rapidity. Our three scientists, aided only by West’s girlfriend, the short lived constable and a bunch of “Oh, arrr” local villagers, have only a day at most to stop the total annihilation of the population of the island by the increasing numbers of silicates. As one of the villagers said to another, in a piece of dialogue that says everything about this movie in terms of its scripting... “There’s some peculiar goings on, going on, on this island.” Not sure if that’s the right punctuation  for that sentence or not but... no, I’m not making this stuff up.

Oh wait. Did I say ‘standard’ monster combat situation. Well, this movie is anything but standard and although the script is quite bad and giggle inducing at regular intervals, it’s... well, it’s pretty well made for starters. There’s some really nice things happening with the composition of the shots and the director uses the varied heights of people to make diagonal patterns and pyramid shapes within the set ups... which works really well and might well be a signature trait of the director since I’m sure I’ve picked up on that element of his films before.

The other thing this movie has got going for it, apart from some brilliant actors and actresses in it who you wouldn’t believe would ever want to attempt to bring these almost unsayable lines to life, is a certain unpredictable quality to it. It’s not a film which sticks completely to a formula and, though the elements of peril and much laboured sense of jeopardy are hitting pretty standard riffs, things suddenly happen in this film that you just don’t expect to see... like the unexpected death of one of the three doctor heroes about half way through the movie (and no, I’m not going to tell you which one that is).

There’s another quite amazing moment which completely contradicts what we know about the physiology of the silicate monsters but is a nice scene, nevertheless... where Peter Cushing’s character gets a tentacle around his wrist and is being pulled towards a silicate. Edward Judd’s character reacts as quickly as he feels the audience can keep up with and grabs an axe, moving towards the silicate... and, just when you expect him to cut the tentacle off the creature, he chops off Cushing’s hand instead. Apparently this particular scene was trimmed in a few countries, including here in the UK, to delete the spurting of blood from Cushing’s stump. However, I’m happy to confirm that this Blu Ray reinstates the second or two shot... which was previously only available in a German DVD release of the movie, from what I can make out.

Even the possible cure to the silicate problem, which I won’t go into here, involves the heroes sacrificing all the cattle on the island to the creatures in order for their mad scheme to work... which is kinda brutal and ruthless even for a modern horror film, when you stop and think about it, let alone something which hit the cinemas in 1966. So all in all, the less than predictable way in which a lot of the plot unfolds is quite stand out and it certainly had me scratching my head, in a good way, at times.

Less good is the amount of padding in this movie. It’s not  long affair but a lot of the film seems like it’s lingering unnecessarily in scenes to fill out the running time. For instance, when the helicopter leaves our heroes on the island we are treated to a long, held shot as it flies off into the distance for a while. The music tries hard to make this long, drawn out static shot sound a bit more exciting but, sad to say, and going back to the comment made about the film looking like it was a comedy, the soundtrack does seem like inappropriate scoring for the majority of the movie. it would be great as a stand alone listen, I’m sure (although I’m also sure we’ll never get the chance) but as support to the movie, it’s heavy rather than robust a lot of the time.

Similar scene padding comes when Cushing and Judd go to collect a load of Strontium 90 from the Manor House. We are treated to a long scene of them putting on their protective radiation suits which takes far longer than it should and, sad to say, looks like each actor is wearing a giant condom over their head. I know the characters want to stay safe but that’s not the kind of safe I was expecting from them, to be honest.

While I’m at it though, I noticed a probable cut scene too, that doesn’t seem to have made the final version of the film. In one scene, where Judd is addressing the village community, he talks about running one of the creatures over... well I can probably hazard a guess as to where this scene would have been but it’s certainly not referring to anything that happens in the movie as it was released... so that’s a bit of a worry. Also, a quick note to anybody fighting monsters... if you’re going to throw Molotov cocktails at rock creatures, don’t stand directly under a tree which happens to have one in it. Just a little word of advice there.

And that’s all I got on this one. The ending is... well it’s a bit more predictable than some films I’ve seen Fisher work on but there's a little punchline of an ending, where one of the characters says the truly groan inducing line... “We’re lucky this was an island. If it had happened anywhere else I don't think we could have destroyed them.”... takes us to a scientific research team in Japan,  obviously working on a similar problem and getting killed offscreen by a similar ‘accidental creature.’ It’s all happening in this movie but it makes for an incredibly corny ending, I must say.

All that being said, though, I absolutely loved Island Of Terror and have no hesitation in recommending it to pretty much anyone who loves these old British B movies and it’s one I’ll no doubt watch a fair few times in my life, now I know it exists. Not a hard release to love and I certainly hope there are a lot more of those kinds of movie coming from wherever they dug this one up from. I’ll be happy to stand in line for them.