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The structure streamlines a trio of C.S. Forester novels and abstracts the action for the benefit of the romance at the center, a Raoul Walsh forte. "A rotting ship ten thousand miles from a friendly port" is like the cowboy's exhausted horse in a Western, Hornblower (Gregory Peck) is a starched uniform to whom a bit of throat-clearing is the very height of soul-bearing. "The rules of war" and its shifting alliances, thus the Spanish galleon overtaken and delivered to the renegade conquistador El Supremo (Alec Mango), who proclaims that "a burning city is a magnificent sight." Suddenly Spain sides with England and the former partner is vanquished in a cannonade under Caribbean skies, but the film isn't about that. An undercover mission in Napoleonic Paris is expertly staged to adduce a thread from Fairbanks and Flynn, but the film isn't about that, either. Rather, the maritime explosions and narrow escapes serve as bookends for the breathtaking moment in which Virginia Mayo gazes at Peck (and the audience) and simply declares "We are lovers and the world is ours." The lady must leave the frigate and return to her fiancé (Denis O'Dea), her view as she's hoisted away from the deck is a reverse tracking shot that dwarfs the protagonist struggling to maintain a heroic bearing amid heartbreak. "This voyage will never end." Later, the captain comes home to a dead wife and an unknown son, and the camera roams across sundry mementos (family portrait, vacant armchair, unfinished sewing canvas) while the woman's ghostly laments are heard. Walsh would return to high-seas adventures (The World in His Arms, Sea Devils), but scarcely with another sequence fit for Joyce's The Dead. With Robert Beatty, Moultrie Kelsall, Terence Morgan, James Kenney, James Robertson Justice, Ingeborg von Kusserow, Christopher Lee, and Stanley Baker.
--- Fernando F. Croce |