Brown on Resolution (film)

Brown on Resolution (US title: Born for Glory; UK re-issue title: Forever England) is a 1935 film directed by Walter Forde and Anthony Asquith and starring John Mills in his first lead role. It was written by J. O. C. Orton based on the 1929 C. S. Forester novel of the same title. The film is notable for being the first film to use actual Royal Navy ships. The plot is centred on the illegitimate son of a British naval officer helping to bring about the downfall of a German cruiser during World War I.

The novel was also later adapted as Sailor of the King (also titled Single-Handed in the US, and sometimes – though rarely – Brown on Resolution), in 1953. The 1935 version retains the novel's original World War I setting, but in the 1953 remake, the setting is realistically updated to the Second World War, as the Germans resumed commerce raiding with surface warships in 1939.

Plot

In 1893, Betty Brown meets debonair young naval officer Lieutenant Summerville and falls in love with him. They have a brief affair until he has to rejoin his ship but as they part, Betty tells him they should not meet again because they are from different social classes and so a marriage would never succeed; however, he gives her a prized watch which is a family heirloom. Later, Betty discovers she is pregnant, but she conceals the pregnancy from him; she gives birth to a boy, Albert Brown, and raises him alone. He joins the Navy as soon as he is old enough, while Summerville, by then a captain but not recognizing the boy as his son, presents him with a sports cup for boxing on his graduation from a naval school.

Brown's ship, HMS Rutland, is posted to the Pacific, where in port they encounter and socialize with the crew of a German armoured cruiser, the SMS Zeithen.