Jutland 1916

Film studies won't become a regular ID feature, but in doing some research on "Battleship", I came across this:

A film about one of the Royal Navy’s most controversial battles is due to be shot next year.

Oscar-winning actor Sir Ben Kingsley is to play the British commander, Admiral Sir John Jellicoe, in the most expensive British-made film about the First World War.

Jutland 1916 will tell the story of the epic clash that took place while the outcome of the war still hung in the balance.

The £40million movie, which will be shot in Britain, will draw on diaries and first-person accounts featured in the book Jutland 1916: Death In the Grey Wastes by Peter Hart and Nigel Steel.

The film is provisionally titled "Jutland 1916," although it might be worth paying Robert Massie for the rights to the name "Castles of Steel", or even Andrew Gordon for "Rules of the Game." I haven't read the Hart and Steel volume, but I've long thought that Gordon's Rules of the Game could plausibly serve as the foundation for a film script; the first chapters (about the "Run to the South" between Beatty and Hippers' battlecruisers) just crackle. I also think that the best dramatic choice for any Jutland film would be trying to understand the battle in terms of the tension between Beatty and Jellicoe. Trying to reduce any battle to competition between two men is invariably an injury to history, but the relevant question with regard to historical epics isn't whether history is injured, but rather how badly. Kingsley as Jellicoe would be fine; perhaps Clive Owen as Beatty?

The film may never be made, but what gives me just a touch of hope is the cinematic nature of the Battle of Jutland. I have no doubt whatsoever that modern special effects can do justice to the destruction of HMS Queen Mary, and to the rest of the battle. Moreover, there are some remarkably dramatic moments within the battle, particularly when the entire Grand Fleet, arrayed in three columns, emerges from the mist ahead of the German van, or when Major Francis Harvey, legs blown off by a German shell, saves HMS Lion by ordering the flooding of the Q-turret magazine.