(1940)

Starring Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, John Wayne, Ward Bond; dir: John Ford

A palpable air of gloom hovers over The Long Voyage Home. In part this is due to the chiaroscuro cinematography of Gregg Toland, then one year away from his invigorating collaboration with the Mercury Theatre on Citizen Kane.

But the darkness in this overlooked John Ford film is something more than visual, it’s also in the pervasive threat of war clouds which bind its varied characters and threads through their interconnected stories.

Set in the present and based at sea, The Long Voyage Home thus differs from typical John (‘I make Westerns’) Ford fare. But these were strange times and this film reflects such displacement, though the deeper currents of Fordiana remain, primarily his orientation to a closed group of men interacting under unusual pressure.

Based on three short plays by Eugene O’Neill, the voyage traverses the film’s three sections in a seamless passage from embarkation to sea to eventual destination. The merchant marine crew know their grimy old freighter is carrying munitions and will be sailing through a war zone, placing them in heightened peril. Hell, even the otherwise by-the-book captain factors this in as we see him turning a blind eye to the boarding of native (ahem) ‘hostesses’ to party down with the men, possibly for the last time, in the opening setpiece at a tropical port.

But this is no hack flag-waver. This is John Ford, and things are going to be different around here. In this context he was a man under pressure too, and as war makes strange bedfellows, so the Irish-American IRA sympathiser of The Informer (1935) found himself, as an ardent anti-Nazi, obliged to champion the British.

That meant the role of ‘the state’ here was filled by Great Britain and there is emblematic use of national symbols to ensure we viewers know what is at stake: the tune of ‘Rule Britannia’, slowed down to a mournful dirge (how very Irish!) links the brooding melancholy of a wronged English sailor (Ian Hunter) to that of his entire nation. And when this same character, now vindicated, dies gallantly while performing his duties in the face of an unprovoked, presumably German, air attack (echoing a near identical set-up in the other Walter Wanger produced propaganda film of 1940, Hitchcock’s Foreign Correspondent), the lifeboat in which he dies undergoes one of the most audacious transformations ever seen in the cinema. As the lifeboat becomes his coffin, its wind-whipped black tarpaulin becomes a shroud, before Ford dissolves its black form into a white British naval ensign, neatly conflating this English sailor’s noble death with the interests of the state.

But this is a John Ford film, and his mixed depiction elsewhere of British interests is revealing of his deeper concerns. A fat British bureaucrat who’s organising the dangerous trip brushes aside the captain’s very real safety concerns with patriotic blather about ‘helping the war effort’ and ‘unsung heroes’, this latter phrase sent up by an eavesdropping crew member. Endorsing Ford’s harsh portrayal of the un-endangered, overweight mandarin, he is dismissed in a very cursory manner by the lean captain, a hands on representative of the professional class who are exposed to danger. Thanks to the eavesdropping, a bottom-up hierarchy is instantly evoked: workers, officers and officials, in descending order of merit. It’s a characteristically efficient lesson in filmmaking from the master.

An American is amongst the crew members, but here again Ford defies expectations. Rather than functioning as a cipher for ‘national characteristics’ as in the combat films of WWII, ‘Yank’ (Ward Bond) slips away early asking "do you think I’m scared?", but seems a merely token presence. John Wayne, by contrast, plays a naïve young Scandinavian in a role which utilises none of his talents, and seems a miscalculation.

There is greatness in The Long Voyage Home and it rests on an extended sequence that is one of the great unheralded scenes in cinema history. The mystifying behaviour of the secretive, self-isolating Smitty (Hunter) arouses dangerously incorrect suspicions in the rest of the crew. The key confrontation scene, virtually a kangaroo court at sea, unfolds painfully slowly as it turns the tables on the solidarity of the crew’s crumbling ‘mob’, disintegrating before our eyes one by one as their individual shame overcomes them each in turn. Unflinchingly gradual in its pacing, the audience is unable to look away as the full import of the terrible misinterpretation is revealed. It’s a scene which should be excerpted in every ‘greatest moments in cinema’ doco - and would be if this film were better known.

In its final stages, The Long Voyage Home does prattle on too much, as Ford indulges his – and the characters’ – love of blarney. And though hardly what one would call a film noir, the eventual conclusion of Voyage does share that genre’s sense of fatalism.

A dour drama of men without women, The Long Voyage Home is uneven but pungent, a rambling rose amidst the gathering storm.