This article will be permanently flagged as inappropriate and made unaccessible to everyone. Are you certain this article is inappropriate? Excessive Violence Sexual Content Political / Social
Email Address:
Article Id: WHEBN0000062693 Reproduction Date:
The Long Voyage Home is a 1940 American drama film directed by John Ford. It features John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Wilfrid Lawson, John Qualen, Mildred Natwick, and Ward Bond, among others.[2]
The film was adapted by Dudley Nichols from the plays The Moon of the Caribbees, In the Zone, Bound East for Cardiff, and The Long Voyage Home by Eugene O'Neill. The original plays by Eugene O'Neill were written around the time of World War I and were among his earliest plays. Ford set the story for the motion picture, however, during World War II.[3]
The picture tells the story of the crew aboard a freighter.
The film tells the story of the crew aboard a British cargo ship named the SS Glencairn, during World War II, on the long voyage home from the West Indies to Baltimore and then to England. The ship carries a cargo of high-explosives.
On liberty, after a night of drinking in bars in the West Indies, the crew returns to the tramp steamer and set sail for Baltimore.
They're a motley group: a middle-aged Irishman Driscoll (Thomas Mitchell), a young Swedish ex-farmer Ole Olsen (John Wayne), the spiteful steward Cocky (Barry Fitzgerald); the brooding Lord Jim-like Englishman Smitty (Ian Hunter), and others.
After the ship picks up a load of dynamite in Baltimore, the rough seas they encounter become nerve-racking to the crew. When the anchor breaks loose, Yank is injured in the effort to secure it. With no doctor on board, nothing can be done for his injury, and he dies.
They're also concerned that Smitty might be a German spy because he's secretive. After they force Smitty to show them his letters from home it turns out that Smitty is an alcoholic who has run away from his family. When they near port, a German plane attacks the ship, killing Smitty in a burst of machine gun fire. The rest of the crew members decide not to sign on for another voyage on the Glencairn and go ashore, determined to help Ole return to his family in Sweden, whom he has not seen in ten years.
At a seedy bar Ole is tricked into taking a drugged drink, and he is shanghaied aboard another ship, the Amindra. Driscoll and the rest of the crew rescue him from the ship, but Driscoll is accidentally left behind in the confusion. As the crew straggles back to the Glencairn the next morning to sign on for another voyage, they learn that the Amindra was sunk by German torpedoes, killing all on board.
Independent film producer
Nominations
Wins
The film made a loss of $224,336.[1]
It was released on DVD in 2006 by Warner Bros. Home Video but is now out-of-print. The Criterion Collection now has the home video rights to release it. It has not yet been released on DVD or Blu Ray by The Criterion Collection.
The review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes reported that 100 percent of critics gave the film a positive review, based on five reviews.[9]
Critic Dennis Schwartz appreciated the acting ensemble in the film and wrote, "The film was too stagebound to be effective cinema, but it scores points in its unsentimental portrait of the loser life of the lonely and desperate merchant seamen. These same misfits, who don't fit the image of heroes, nevertheless come through as men who do their duty when the chips are down and prove they will fight for their country even though it's not necessarily for patriotic reasons."[8]
The staff at Variety magazine wrote, "Combining dramatic content of four Eugene O'Neill one-act plays, John Ford pilots adventures of a tramp steamer from the West Indies to an American port, and then across the Atlantic with cargo of high explosives. Picture is typically Fordian, his direction accentuating characterizations and adventures of the voyage."[7]
Critic Bosley Crowther, film critic for The New York Times, liked the screenplay, the message of the film, and John Ford's direction, and wrote, "John Ford has truly fashioned a modern Odyssey—a stark and tough-fibered motion picture which tells with lean economy the never-ending story of man's wanderings over the waters of the world in search of peace for his soul...it is harsh and relentless and only briefly compassionate in its revelation of man's pathetic shortcomings. But it is one of the most honest pictures ever placed upon the screen; it gives a penetrating glimpse into the hearts of little men and, because it shows that out of human weakness there proceeds some nobility, it is far more gratifying than the fanciest hero-worshiping fare."[6]
[5][4]
Cold War, Battle of Stalingrad, Nazi Germany, Battle of the Atlantic, Second Sino-Japanese War
Richard Nixon, Marlon Brando, Frank Sinatra, Dustin Hoffman, Jack Nicholson
Steven Spielberg, Clint Eastwood, Academy Awards, Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese
Nobel Prize in Literature, Anna Christie, Boston, Long Day's Journey Into Night, Robert E. Sherwood
Warner Bros., Rebecca (1940 film), The Grapes of Wrath (film), Foreign Correspondent (film), Our Town (1940 film)
Jack Nicholson, Laurence Olivier, Frank Sinatra, Peter Ustinov, Academy Awards
John Ford, Dudley Nichols, 20th Century Fox, Men Without Women (film), Born Reckless (1930 film)
John Ford, Dudley Nichols, Henrietta Crosman, Heather Angel (actor), 20th Century Fox
John Ford, Dudley Nichols, Will Rogers, Ben Lucien Burman, Anne Shirley (actress)