Rented Captains Courageous and Captain Horatio Hornblower (there's a great video rental outfit in DC which has just about everything ever put out on DVD or VHS) the other day after reading this thread. I'd seen Hornblower once a long time ago but never Captains Courageous. I really enjoyed both, particularly the schooner sailing scenes in CC. The special effects in Hornblower were no doubt state-of-the-art in 1951 but after the CGI in Master and Commander, I'm spoiled.
One of the worst movie sequences for anyone who knows anything about sailing was a scene I remember from some low-budget version of Treasure Island. You see the ship "drifting" into the wind with her flags streaming straight aft. I believe I remember a scene with her "sailing" with the sails flat aback, too, but perhaps I am exaggerating the awfulness in hindsight.
For reading in the historical naval fiction genre, Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey/Maturin IMHO is far and away the best. I am in the process of reading the entire series through for the third time. After O'Brian, I loved Forester's Hornblower and Nordhoff and Hall's Bounty trilogy (btw the Mel Gibson version of Mutiny on the Bounty is my favorite; being male, I particularly applaud the authenticity in depicting the Tahitian women's attire). The others mostly suffer from being too obviously knock-offs of the classics, or overdone with the swashbuckling, or both.
