Ford’s stylistic triumph is weak on narrative but strong on expressionist visual beauty
Director: John Ford
Cast: John Wayne (Olsen), Thomas Mitchell (Driscoll), Ian Hunter (Smitty), Barry Fitzgerald (Cocky Stuart), Wilfrid Lawson (Captain), John Qualen (Axel Swanson), Mildred Natwick (Freda), Ward Bond (Yank), Arthur Shields (Donkeyman), Joseph Sawyer (Davis), J.M. Kerrigan (Crimp)
John Ford is most associated with the grand vistas of the West. But ask him what film he really admired, and he was likely to answer FW Murnau’s Sunrise. The atmospheric beauty of the only ever winner of the Oscar for Unique and Artistic Picture inspired Ford to make this adaptation of four one-act Eugene O’Neill plays. The look and feel was so important to Ford, he even willingly shared his title card with photographic maestro Gregg Toland. The Long Voyage Home is not always a film of outstanding narrative, but it can claim to be possibly the most visually striking film Ford ever made.
The story focuses on the crew of the British merchant ship Glencairn, making its way from the West Indies back to England during the Second World War. Captained by a distant skipper (Wilfrid Lawson), the moral leader of the mostly Irish crew is boisterous, good-natured Driscoll (Thomas Mitchell). His shipmates include genial young Swede Ole Olsen (John Wayne), brooding, suspicious Englishman Smitty (Ian Hunter), trouble-maker Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald), burly bruiser Yank (Ward Bond) and timid Swede Axel (John Qualen). During the voyage, tragedy will occur, suspicion of treachery will fall on Smitty and Olsen will struggle to return to his family after ten years away.
The Long Voyage Home mashes the plots of these four O’Neill play into one loose narrative (and it is very loose), where you can almost see the joins as we progress from one play to another. But O’Neill loved the end result – he claimed to have watched his print of the film so often it wore out. Essentially, every twenty-five minutes or so, a new crisis or plot point kicks off and runs its course towards a (usually) tragic ending, all of which serves as a neat reminder that serving at sea is a tough life with more than a few perils, made even worse when you do it during war time.
But The Long Voyage Home is really an impressionistic Murnau film populated by the sort of amiable, good-natured, hard-drinking, quick-to-fight-quick-to-laugh Irishmen Ford loved. It’s a sort of Quiet Man Goes to Sea (a double gag now, since Wayne is the quietest man in it), with Thomas Mitchell’s larger-than-life mix of sentimental affection and roaring, fist-throwing joi d-vivre driving the narrative. It’s Driscoll who smuggles on Caribbean lovelies and alcohol for the crew before departing the West Indies, leads the way in any fights, but also comforts the dying and casts a fatherly arm over those in need. He’s the heart in Ford’s experiment in pushing the stylistic envelope.
It’s a very successful pushing, because The Long Voyage Home looks fabulous. This is possibly some of the finest photographic work Gregg Toland ever did – on the basis of this, Welles decided Toland was the man for Citizen Kane. From its opening, Long Voyage Home is a sumptuous collection of moody, fog-filled shots, where streaks of light cast powerful shadows over multiple scenes. Toland opens with a deep focus shot of the ship at sea, with West Indian women foregrounded from the opening and moves from there to mist being sliced through by searchlight torches to reveal the ship.
It’s a stylistic benchmark the film maintains throughout. Only Ford and Toland may have been brave enough to use light and shadow so strikingly. Some scenes are even lit facing into a strong light, casting long shadows towards the camera from which characters emerge. The ship is shot from unique and imaginative angles, most strikingly a low angle lens that Ward Bond’s luckless Yank is washed towards like a mannequin. The sort of striking visual imagery from The Informer is pushed even further. A character dies in a row boat, suddenly peppered by a Luftwaffe machine gun, his leg hanging over the side. The English port sees light dance off the cobble-stones and dingy pubs turned into places of shadow-filled beauty. A final punch-up is partly shot through dropped torches and lit matches. It’s a visual masterpiece.
The fact it’s not more highly regarded in Ford’s cannon is possibly because the episodic story is not always the most compelling, largely because it lacks a true through-line as it moves from event-to-event. But, in many ways, the way it plays a bit fast and loose with O’Neill is to its credit. No slavish, stagey reprise here (unlike, say, Ford’s less successful Mister Roberts). But it does make it a film that’s easy to drop in and out of, and one hard to summarise other than “(mostly) Irish sailors shoot the breeze on a ship”. Many of these chapters are striking, but it’s a film lacking narrative force.
What it’s straining towards is the idea that these men – all of whom are almost like big kids on a day trip – are deeply in love with the freedom of the sea, while also feeling trapped in its embrace. And that, perhaps, with the tendency to drink and fight at the drop of a hat, makes them their own worst enemies. Nearly every crisis in the film comes out of one or other of these demons. I suspect the idea doesn’t crystalise because Ford can’t shake his affectionate regard for exactly those qualities. (It’s also an unremarked irony that for nearly all these guys, this is not a ‘voyage home’ at all).
It’s also perhaps overlooked because people can’t wrap their head around the on-paper bizarre casting of John Wayne. The Duke, surely, was literally no one’s idea of a Swede. It’s a reminder of what a star Wayne was that your eye is so constantly drawn to him, considering how little he does for most of the film. He makes a noble attempt at an accent, but it must have been even worse than what we end up with considering Ole barely speaks for almost an hour and twenty minutes. Ford, who wasn’t that convinced by Wayne’s acting at the best of times, clearly cut some losses here.
The Long Voyage Home is at its best when it focuses on the visuals, and when it falls back on the natural charisma and easy-bond between its character actor stars, in particular Mitchell and Fitzgerald (Mildred Natwick also gives a fine performance as a guilt-ridden good-time girl). The atmospheric, brooding intensity is outstanding and, perhaps more than any other Ford film, it has shots you could hang in a gallery. It’s a lovely reminder of what an artist, the hard-drinking tough-guy really was.
