Sailor of the King
1953 film directed by Roy Boulting
Sailor of the King is a 1953 British war film directed by Roy Boulting and starring Jeffrey Hunter, Michael Rennie and Wendy Hiller. It is based on the 1929 novel Brown on Resolution by C. S. Forester. The film is set largely in the Pacific, and Hunter stars as a Canadian sailor serving on a British warship who battles single-handedly to delay a German World War II warship long enough for the Royal Navy to bring it to battle.
The film was released in Britain as Single-Handed.
It was filmed at Shepperton Studios near London and on location in the Mediterranean around Malta. The film's sets were designed by the art director Alex Vetchinsky. An earlier 1935 film Forever England was based on the same novel and starred John Mills under Walter Forde's direction.
Plot
During the First World War, Lieutenant Richard Saville, a young Royal Navy officer on five days' leave, and Miss Lucinda Bentley, a merchant's daughter from Portsmouth, get talking on the train up to London. Halfway through their journey, they miss their rail connection and spend a romantic holiday in the countryside of southern England. When Saville proposes, she accepts, but on the day they are due to go back to Portsmouth, she changes her mind, asking Saville to realise that neither he nor she could bear being parted for the long periods he would be at sea.
The public source identifies “Sailor of the King” as 1953 film directed by Roy Boulting. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sailor, King and film.
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Attribution, date and provenance are strongest when supported by the original work, a catalogue record and documented transmission. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q3293133. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1953, 1929 and 1935.
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This entry incorporates text from “Sailor of the King” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.