During the Great War, young artillery officer Michael Rennie meets shy Wendy Hiller on a train bound for London. They fall into an affair and Rennie proposes marriage. She turns him down because a wife is an impediment to a navy man with no background. During the early days of World War II, Rennie has risen to admiral, in pursuit of a German battleship in the Pacific. The companion ship is destroyed, and young signalman Jeffrey Hunter, a fatherless man whose mother came from England to Montreal, and who has pushed him to the Navy since since he could walk, is pulled from the water and is a prisoner on the damaged German ship. When they pull into an inlet in the Galápagos, Hunter escapes, climbs into the cliffs, and besieges the ship to stop the repairs.
It's based on C.S. Forester's early best-seller, BROWN ON RESOLUTION, drawn from an incident from the First World War. An earlier version, BORN TO GLORY, had starred a young John Mills.
This version, produced by 20th Century-Fox, is a product of the company's British division. Director Roy Boulting does a wonderful job, with Malta standing in for the Galápagos, does a splendid job. Although there is a lot of talk for the first two-thirds of the movie, Hunter -- with his shirt off -- silently battles Germans and the sun in a wordless struggle. Bernard Lee and Peter van Eyck are in the cast, and the score is by an inevitable Muir Mathieson.
It's based on C.S. Forester's early best-seller, BROWN ON RESOLUTION, drawn from an incident from the First World War. An earlier version, BORN TO GLORY, had starred a young John Mills.
This version, produced by 20th Century-Fox, is a product of the company's British division. Director Roy Boulting does a wonderful job, with Malta standing in for the Galápagos, does a splendid job. Although there is a lot of talk for the first two-thirds of the movie, Hunter -- with his shirt off -- silently battles Germans and the sun in a wordless struggle. Bernard Lee and Peter van Eyck are in the cast, and the score is by an inevitable Muir Mathieson.