Mr. Midshipman Hornblower

"Damme if I'll let him see he has made me angry."--Captain Sir Edward Pellew

Apart from this strange spelling of damn, this is a thought provoking piece of dialog.

This is a direct quote from the book Mr. Midshipman Hornblower. Not long ago, Ioan Groffud starred in a television adaptation of the same, and this Edward Pellew dude said this exact line in that as well. And this wasn't the only occurance of a piece of dialog being the same in both media. A great deal of the dialog out of the Hornblower book got without deviation into the television shows.

In the television shows, though, there was a lot more talking. There was hours of television, sometimes, that in the book was only a paragraph. One particular instance, near the end Hornblower is in a Spanish prison, a POW, and it says that he was there for a few months and didn't like it much. In the television show during that time period there was a return of a character from an earlier episode thought dead and an attempted escape and subsequent punishment at least.

C.S. Forester is an excellent writer. I entertain myself these days, when reading, by judging the sentences, seeing if I have a problem with them, and if so how to fix them. Or judging if they're clear, or if they could be more clever. In general, there wasn't an occurance of an unclear or badly phrased sentence in this book. The dialog was also good, but there really wasn't much of it. Forester concentrated on two things: Hornblower himself, and boats. He spent more time describing messing about in boats than anything else, and the only character that he seems to enjoy at all is his main character. Who is, admittedly, and agreeable and interesting character. But another, I think good, change that the television shows made from the book was to bring in some other characters. Throughout the book Forester will mention seamen who only stick around for a couple seconds. In the television shows there are about four seamen who are constant through the stories instead.

An interesting sort of juxtaposition. A good piece of literature and a good movie adaptation and the changes that were made and the changes that were not.