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The Long Voyage Home

by Glenn Erickson Aug 29, 2023

This 2016 restoration helps Eugene O’Neill’s seagoing story retake its place as one of John Ford’s most accomplished pictures. John Wayne stars as part of an ensemble — Ford’s direction and Gregg Toland’s cinematography are the stars. A crew of ordinary merchant seaman must sail into wartime waters. O’Neill provides the ironic character studies, and John Ford’s philosophical view of men at sea fills out the details. With no conventional romance, this melancholy thriller faced an uphill battle at the box office — O’Neill and Ford offer a more realistic representation of the sailors’ women in port. The cast is a full roster of Ford actors — Thomas Mitchell, Barry Fitzgerald, Ward Bond, John Qualen — and a melancholy outsider, Ian Hunter.


The Long Voyage Home
Blu-ray
Viavision [Imprint] 222
1940 / B&W / 1:37 Academy / 105 min. / Street Date May 31, 2023 / Listed at Viavision / aud 39.95
Starring: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Wilfrid Lawson, John Qualen, Mildred Natwick, Ward Bond, Arthur Shields, Joe Sawyer, J.M. Kerrigan, Rafaela Ottiano, Carmen Morales, Jack Pennick, Bob E. Perry, Constant Franke, David Hughes, Dan Borzage, Harry Tenbrook, Cyril McLaglen, Douglas Walton, James Flavin, Harry Woods.
Cinematography: Gregg Toland
Art Director: James Basevi
Film Editor: Sherman Todd
Original Music: Richard Hageman
Adapted for the screen by Dudley Nichols, based on four Sea Plays by Eugene O’Neill
Produced by John Ford ( + Walter Wanger)
Directed by
John Ford

John Ford’s least-seen masterpiece The Long Voyage Home is wholly satisfying from multiple directions. Taken from four plays by Eugene O’Neill and adapted by screenwriter Dudley Nichols, it expresses most of Ford’s thematic and visual preoccupations. Although set in ‘present day’ wartime (1940), it has only one scene of combat conflict. O’Neill’s plays have been shifted from WW1 to WW2, but they really play out at a philosophical remove. Few of the sailors go to sea because they want to, and some are exiles from earlier lives.

When Ford left to serve in WW2, he had just finished a string of great movies, a three-year burst of fine art, exhuberant adventure and social comment: Stagecoach,  Young Mr. Lincoln,  Drums Along the Mohawk,  The Grapes of Wrath,  this movie and How Green Was My Valley.

 

The Long Voyage Home is generally placed in the same vein as Ford’s The Informer, another moody drama from a literary source, and a critical success that raised his stature as a director. Both film show the influence on Ford of director F.W. Murnau, whose silent Sunrise steered the look of Fox films for several years. Voyage Home is set mostly on board a merchant vessel, with highly realistic sets given a chiaroscuro visual treatment by cinematographer Gregg Toland. Every college paper on Orson Welles mentions the Ford / Toland connection — Welles praised their work to high heaven and asked for Toland for his Citizen Kane. Welles title-dropped Stagecoach, but Voyage Home is the Toland movie that really resembles Welles’ work.

The show was an independent production. As is pointed out by audio commentators Alain Silver and James Ursini, this made a big difference to Ford. When working for Fox, studio head Darryl Zanuck supervised and turned in the final cut, and often altered Ford’s work. We can see for ourselves the commercial changes Zanuck made to Ford’s My Darling Clementine because both cuts were preserved as finished films.

Voyage Home was made by John Ford & Merian Cooper’s Argosy Corporation, and funded by the independent producer Walter Wanger, as a follow-up to the hugely successful Ford-Wanger hit Stagecoach, which confirmed John Wayne as a leading film star. That explains the top billing given Wayne — his name was needed on the advertising for a film largely without the content deemed commercially necessary: a conventional romance. It’s clear that United Artists didn’t know how to sell the movie — original posters misleadingly depict happy sailors and smiling women.

 

Dudley Nichols’ screenplay folds in four separate O’Neill plays. Bound for London in 1940, the freighter Glencairn is in danger from German U-Boats and patrol planes. The crew is informed only after the fact that their cargo is explosive munitions, but they are allotted some bonus pay for the added risk. For a farewell party in the West Indies, the unofficial below-decks ringleader Drisk (Thomas Mitchell) arranges for some prostitutes, who bring liquor in fruit baskets. The captain (Wilfrid Lawson) allows the women on board. The party is a vulgar bash, but the old sailor Axel (John Qualen) makes sure that young Olsen (John Wayne) doesn’t drink. The boorish Yank (Ward Bond) is trouble from the start, manhandling the women and provoking the non-participant Smitty (Ian Hunter), a quiet alcoholic who guards his secrets.

The episodes that follow emphasize the loneliness and anxiety on board. Blackout conditions are observed at all times. Yank suffers an injury during a violent storm, and the Glencairn has no medical officer. Smitty’s behavior draws suspicion that he might be a Nazi spy, a concern that turns his basically benign comrades into a lynch mob. Nearing Ireland, the unarmed ship is strafed by a German plane. Once safe in port in London, the crew rushes to celebrate in a Limehouse bar. They’re unaware that a bar tout (J.M. Kerrigan), a bartender (Billy Bevan) and a prostitute (Mildred Natwick) are acting as an unofficial Press Gang: another ship that needs to sail is short a crewman — and isn’t above kidnapping one.

 

Made a full year before the U.S. entered the war The Long Voyage Home had to follow isolationist edicts. There are no pro-England speeches. No mention is made of air attacks on London (which mostly began as filming wrapped up). The emphasis is on non-combatant seamen that must take the same risk as navy personnel. Unlike Warners’ later Action in the North Atlantic, Ford bypasses patriotic glamour to tell a story of the vagaries of chance and fate on the high seas. The dialogue scenes feature Eugene O’Neill’s poetic characters speaking of past regrets and future hopes. Ford overlays his personal brand of sentimentality, starting with multiple references to Ireland.

Ford’s visual poetry is at its peak, stressing a melancholy sentimentality. Ford characters are forever arriving, or departing into the distance; the core of a Ford film is often a farewell shot of a lonely hero — Henry Fonda’s Tom Joad, John Wayne’s Ethan Edwards. The sailors of Voyage Home take a paternalistic interest in young Olsen. Nothing in the show promises a happy ending. We hear so much talk about the plan for Olsen to leave the sea and go back to Sweden, that we fear a downbeat finale.

Ford was a Navy reservist who (as reported by Joseph McBride) sailed his personal pleasure craft to Mexican ports, to collect news of German activity. O’Neill’s psychological studies are bolstered by Ford’s intense interest in ordinary sailors. Most of the actors are from his stock company: Harry Tenbrook, Danny Borzage, Jack Pennick and Joseph Sawyer. Thomas Mitchell was practically a Ford essential, having starred in two earlier Ford hits. Ian Hunter was not part of the Ford stable. His tortured Englishman Smitty drinks in secret and stays by himself, only for his crewmates to interepret his secrecy as malign. Smitty is horrified when they raid his private letters to find out if he’s a spy; they instead discover why an obviously cultured man would run away to drink himself to death on a cargo ship.

 

That part of the story may be John Ford’s strongest statement about isolation, and perhaps his own addiction to alcohol. The director gave the impression in interviews that he had no interest in art and that his film work was just a job. The emotional intensity of his filmmaking says otherwise. Every character close-up in Voyage Home betrays him as a committed sentimentalist.

Someone in the production, not necessarily John Ford, had the brilliant stroke to feature an instrumental of the 1937 Will Grosz hit song ‘Harbor Lights’.  The wistful melody connects with the use of Alfred Newman’s equally hypersentimental ‘Moon of Manakoora’, associated with joyful sailors’ welcomes in Ford’s South Seas tale The Hurricane. Ford repeated the motif for the 1955 Mister Roberts; for 1963’s Donovan’s Reef the Polynesian welcome is stylized as a ritual, as if old sailors Wayne and Lee Marvin were arriving for their heavenly reward.

In the much darker Voyage Home the arrival in London is marked by a grim death procession, complete with a widow who collapses in grief. The Glencairn’s ‘native welcome’ in the West Indies is a purely transactional affair. It is stylized with cutaways to prostitutes on shore, caressing themselves in glamour poses. The shots work best as an expression of the sailors’ thoughts about female company.

The lusty Latin women contrast with the miserable London prostitutes working in the wharf dive. The seductive floozy charged with getting Olsen to drink is no Hollywood starlet, but actress Mildred Natwick, making her film debut. She’s possibly the most realistic fallen woman to ever tempt a sailor.

 

Gregg Toland’s expressive cinematography finds excellent compositions, often with figures silhouetted in fog and surrounded by darkness. The introspective tone continues in numerous nonverbal sequences, some as good as anything Ford ever directed. One trucking shot down a line of posed men at the rail is as fussy as a verse of O’Neill dialogue, but plays naturally in the perpetual night and fog. Rear-projection is used constantly, and done so well that it soon becomes invisible. We really feel as if we’re on a ship at sea. Likewise, Ford’s experts use their The Hurricane experience with water dump tanks to fashion an impressive storm at sea. For one shot John Qualen is washed off his feet, and slides roughly into an iron stair. In the air attack we never see an enemy plane, only the machine gun hits on the decks.

Each of the stories features a strong character irony. Ward Bond’s Yank is a lout with little respect for others, but he accepts his bad luck without complaint. Smitty doesn’t collapse in misery after his secrets are revealed to the crew. When the ship comes under attack he instead takes charge like an officer, in defense of all. Nobody thinks Olsen belongs at sea, but he’s the one sailor with the presence of mind to attack a fire that might spread to the explosives in the ship’s hold. The cruelest irony is reserved for the end, the kind of tragedy that sees the most popular of the sailors on the wrong ship, at the wrong time, in the wrong war.

 

A couple of extra notes: another impressive movie about the everyday lives of real sailors, in this case some peacetime hands tempted to smuggle goods, is Basil Dearden’s excellent Brit-noir thriller Pool of London.

The fear of an enemy turncoat on board reflects some truth in real life. The first mate is played by actor Cyril McLaglen, one of several brothers of the star Victor McLaglen, who won an Oscar in Ford’s The Informer. Cyril and Victor had a genuine Black Sheep brother named Leopold, who spent his life in various scurrilous activities until he got caught up with subversive Nazi espionage in pre-war Los Angeles. When Leopold McLaglen was thrown out of the country in 1938, brother Victor paid his boat fare, as a good riddance gesture.

 


 

Viavision [Imprint]’s Blu-ray of The Long Voyage Home is a beautiful encoding of a handsome restoration performed in 2016 by the UCLA Film and Television Archive. The copyright notice goes to Trans-Beacon Corporation, which we’re told was a new name of C & C Film Corp. the company formed to sell RKO films to Television. How Voyage Home found its way into that TV package is unclear.

The picture is rich and textured, and in far better shape than the previous DVD (2006) released by Warner Home Video. It’s also intact, with no changes to the title sequence.

[Imprint]’s disc extras will attract scholars of John Ford and Eugene O’Neill, one commentary and three video pieces. They aren’t as redundant as they might seem — each critic, historian and academic expresses a different point of view. Alain Silver and Jim Ursini’s authoritative, comprehensive audio commentary gives historical context to the film’s themes. José Arroyo concentrates his talk on John Ford, while Jean Chothia examines the movie in terms of Eugene O’Neill’s legacy. Critic Tag Gallagher examines Ford’s visual storytelling style, in his visual essay.

Reviewed by Glenn Erickson


The Long Voyage Home
Blu-ray rates:
Movie: Excellent
Video: Excellent
Sound: Excellent
Supplements:
Audio commentary by Alain Silver and Jim Ursini
Lecture featurette by University of Warwick film professor José Arroyo
Lecture featurette by Cambridge University English professor Jean Chothia
Visual essay Going Home by Tag Gallagher.
Deaf and Hearing-impaired Friendly? YES; Subtitles: English (feature only)
Packaging: One Blu-ray in Keep case in heavy slip case
Reviewed:
August 25, 2023
(6984long)
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Text © Copyright 2023 Glenn Erickson

About Glenn Erickson

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Glenn Erickson left a small town for UCLA film school, where his spooky student movie about a haunted window landed him a job on the CLOSE ENCOUNTERS effects crew. He’s a writer and a film editor experienced in features, TV commercials, Cannon movie trailers, special montages and disc docus. But he’s most proud of finding the lost ending for a famous film noir, that few people knew was missing. Glenn is grateful for Trailers From Hell’s generous offer of a guest reviewing haven for CineSavant.

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david smith

Phil Ochs wrote a fantastic song based on the movie, which he acknowledges in the live intro to one version where he name checks Ford and O’Niell. Many versions available on YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bOq0F8DW2uI&ab_channel=PhilOchs-Topic

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[…] Nation. Mildred Natwick played an English prostitute for Ford, when he cast her in her first movie, The Long Voyage Home. Jane Darwell from The Grapes of Wrath is perhaps allowed to be a little too loud and […]

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