Review of The Long Voyage Home (1940) by Chance F — 13 Jun 2010

This is one of those movies my mom turned me on to while compiling her list of top-rated movies to have in her collection.

Based on a story by Eugene O'Neill, 'Voyage' centers around a freighter called the 'Glencairn', filled with an assortment of rough and tough sailors just trying to survive from one port to the next in the early days of World War II.

You would think with John Ford at the helm and John Wayne in the credits, it would be more rough and tumble, but you are never far from the fact it's...this is important...based on stories by Eugene O'Neill. You know, 'The Iceman Cometh', 'Desire Under The Elms', etc., so you know there's loads and loads of pathos and bathos abounding. In fact, this movie is an amalgam of four O'Neill plays, including the one for which the movie took its name.

Wayne is not your basic American sailor. In fact, he's a Swede named Ole Olsen, complete with Scandinavian accent. Being only a year or so removed from his great breakout film 'Stagecoach', one wonders if he was pushing a little not to be typecast as a cowboy. It didn't work, but that's not saying he did a bad job.

Wayne, along with Barry Fitzgerald (who would later pair with Wayne in the immortal 'The Quiet Man') Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter and the rest made up a ensemble cast that thoroughly captured the lives of sailors who scratched their way through (not always surviving), wondering whether the next port would be their last.