Ford stitches four O’Neill one-act plays into one voyage on a tramp steamer, and Gregg Toland lights it more beautifully than anything else in the director’s career. The story underneath is patched and sometimes maudlin. Worth your evening, in the dark.
John Ford made The Long Voyage Home in 1940, the same year as The Grapes of Wrath, and it looks like nothing else he made. Dudley Nichols has taken four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill about the crew of a tramp steamer and stitched them into a single voyage, from a Caribbean anchorage to a British port with a hold of explosives in between. It is, we think, the most beautifully photographed film of Ford’s career. It is also patched together, and in places it sags.
Gregg Toland shot it the year before Citizen Kane, and you can watch him working out what he would do there. The first twenty minutes are close to a silent film. The Glencairn sits off an island at night, the men lean on the rail, and women in white dresses stand on the shore under palms. When Bella (Rafaela Ottiano) rows out with a boatload of women and rum, Toland lights the boat from below so the faces float on the dark. Below deck the fo’c’sle is a low box of smoke, lit from one lamp, half of every face black. Nothing has happened yet and already the men look like ghosts. We were not ready for how much that got to us.
Ford’s company is all here. Thomas Mitchell’s Driscoll is the loud Irish heart of the ship, first into every fight and first to buy the round after it. Barry Fitzgerald’s Cocky has an opinion on everything. John Qualen’s Axel and Ward Bond’s Yank fill the bunks, and Arthur Shields, as the old Donkeyman who stays aboard when the party starts, gets a quiet talk on deck that tells you all you need about a man who has stopped wanting anything. Ian Hunter’s Smitty drinks alone, speaks properly and gives nothing away, and Joe Sawyer’s Davis is the one who decides that is suspicious.
Then there is John Wayne, top-billed and hardly the lead. Ole Olsen is a big slow Swedish boy who has been at sea too long and wants to go home to his mother’s farm. Wayne plays him with a wobbly Swedish accent and no vanity at all, and it moved us more than we expected. When the others tease him about the farm he simply describes it, the land and the animals, and his face opens up; it is the only time in the film anyone looks happy. Ford keeps him slightly apart from the others, and the second half turns on whether he gets where he is going. We will not say.
The seams show. Four plays make four episodes, and Nichols has not hidden the joins: an anchorage, a sailing, a storm, a scare, a port, each with its own shape and its own curtain. Sherman Todd cuts the storm so that we always know which man is where on a deck that is mostly water, and it is the most physically convincing stretch of the film. Richard Hageman’s score is sparing and stays out of the night scenes, which is right. But Ford cannot resist a song, a toast, a tear on a rough man’s cheek, and there are moments, mostly involving Mitchell, where the film asks us to be moved and we found ourselves waiting instead.
The stretch that has aged best is the Atlantic crossing, when a hold full of munitions and a crew with nothing to do but drink and think produce a suspicion about one of their own. Ford stages it in the fo’c’sle with the lamp swinging and nobody raising his voice for a long time, and we sat still through the whole of it. We will not say what they find. The war is everywhere and hardly named: the ship is British, the cargo is for England, and this was 1940, more than a year before Ford’s own country joined in. For a Hollywood film of the moment it is unusually plain about what the men on these boats were carrying.
The last act moves to London, to a dockside pub where Mildred Natwick’s Freda pours the drinks, and it tips into a melodrama the earlier scenes had done without. We can see why critics in 1940 treated the film as close to a milestone, and why it has faded a little since. Toland’s way of lighting a room was copied for decades. Nobody copied the story. Watch it at night with the lights off. Perhaps a third of its 105 minutes are among the finest images American cinema produced in that decade, which is a reason to see a film, and not quite a reason to love it.
