The Long Voyage Home

All men are drifters, quite literally, in John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home, for too long overshadowed by the master director’s better-known masterpieces. Based on several early one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, and Ford’s only work in this collection, the film is set in a Spanish-speaking port of the West Indies for the first half, then the wide open ocean for the second. The rudderless seamen are the crew of an Irish tramp steamer, the Glencairn, which includes a very young John Wayne as the Swedish Olsen, who keeps a pet parrot and for years has been attempting to get home to his family (an unlikely casting choice for any film approximating noir, Wayne has top billing but relatively few lines) and Thomas Mitchell as Driscoll, the putative leader of the group who attempts to keep spirits lifted but will come to a tragic end. For noir fans, the reason to seek out The Long Voyage Home is its extraordinary visual style fueled by Basevi’s dramatic production design and especially the spectacular B&W cinematography by Gregg Toland, who would establish his legacy the following year with Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane. Dialogue-free for the first five minutes as bored sailors listen to distant percussion rhythms from a moonlit pier, the film paints poetry in the depth, the night sky inseparable from the black ocean, but this calm later breaks into a precisely choreographed riot fueled by the drunkenness of a lascivious party onboard with friendly native women bearing fruit baskets.