A strange, episodic film about a group of seamen who are charged with transporting munitions from a tropical port to England to help the British war effort.

These men aren't in the military themselves, which puts them in a sort of limbo. Though their mission is driven by the war, and their lives will be in danger from German U-boats prowling the sea they have to pass through, the war itself is only a vague specter in their actual lives, which are much more concerned with personal emotions and motives: homesickness being the primary one. The movie could serve as a representation for America as a country at the time of the film's release -- not directly involved in a war that one way or another was going to have a huge impact on it regardless.

John Ford gives the film a melancholy and even rather eerie vibe, helped in no small part by Gregg Toland's cinematography. But I can't say I ever really warmed to the film. Its episodic nature starts to feel monotonous after a while. We just start to learn something about a character and then the narrative moves along to yet another long drunken fistfight. Something about the movie remains deeply unsatisfying, even if one can appreciate the artistry that went into it.

John Wayne is now given top billing for this film, but he's part of a large ensemble cast without a real star. And oh my goodness, no one should have asked him to try a Swedish accent.

"The Long Voyage Home" was nominated for six Oscars, though it went home empty handed: Outstanding Production, Best Screenplay (Dudley Nichols),Best Cinematography (B&W),Best Film Editing (Sherman Todd),Best Original Score (Richard Hageman),and Best Special Effects (R.T. Layton, R.O. Binger, and Thomas T. Moulton).

Grade: B

Now isn't my summary awfully confusing?! How can a somewhat dull film STILL be worth seeing? Well, believe it or not, the problem is that the plot isn't all that compelling but the characters are so well-crafted that the film is still outstanding!! Sure, some of them seem an awful lot like stereotypical clichés--especially John Qualen's performance as a Norwegian, by Yimminy!! In fact, he says "by yimminy" about 60 times during the film--somewhat typical for a Qualen performance in a Ford film, actually!! But apart from this, there are a lot of great characters such as the Yank (Ward Bond),Drisk (Thomas Mitchell) and Smitty (Ian Hunter). The one person in the film I really DID have trouble categorizing is Ole Olsen (John Wayne). It seems Ole is a Swede and I really had trouble seeing Wayne as a Swede!!! Probably this is because since this film he's become so type-cast. I really don't think his accent was that bad--I just kept waiting for John to shoot an Indian or walk with the usual John Wayne walk, but it wasn't to be.

Maybe one of the reasons this is less successful than most of the other movies John Ford was directing about this time is that the other productions were so darned good. "The Long Voyage Home" isn't without interest but it doesn't measure up to the rest of Ford's work. Based on a couple of Eugene O'Neill's short plays, it gives us four patched-together stories: a drunken brawl aboard a small freighter in a Caribbean port, the death of a crew member (Yank, Ward Bond) and his funeral, the heroic redemption of Smitty the suspected spy, and the heroic struggle of a handful of inebriated men to get Ole (John Wayne) aboard a ship for home in the face of temptation.

I haven't read that much of Eugene O'Neill's work and seen little of it performed but I get the impression his plays are, by necessity, largely literary works involving a kind of pointillism in which secrets and character traits are revealed little by little, mostly through dialog about psychology. "Strange Interlude" had characters breaking the fourth wall and addressing the audience directly, explaining their REAL thoughts. This is hardly Ford territory.

Not that Ford and O'Neill held each other in low esteem. They were two driven Irish-Americans and shared the occasional drunken crying jag. Dudley Nichols wrote the script and seems to have preserved the parts of the four stories that would most appeal to Ford -- funerals, comic fist fights, camaraderie, and booze. Ford directed it all with aplomb and to the extent that the stories hang together it's because we follow the same characters through all of them, so we get to know the men and their quirks.

The acting, alas, is not all it could be. Some of the more seasoned are fine -- Barry Fitzgerald, John Qualen, Thomas Mitchell, J. M. Kerrigan. But others --. John Wayne should never appear in a role requiring any kind of accent. He sounds about as Swedish as moo goo gai pan and he seems self-aware enough to be embarrassed about it. And Ward Bond should stick with his sidekick roles and never again assay a dramatic part. He's much better at imitating a whinnying horse than a dying and hallucinating sailor. Ian Hunter as Smitty, the suspected spy, is not bad in an important role -- just bland. The scene in which his shipmates find a stack of letters supposed to be in code and read them aloud, only to realize that they are love letters from his wife, must have been borrowed and revamped for "Destination Tokyo".

That pretty much gets any weaknesses out of the way. James Basevi's set decoration is splendid and Gregg Toland's photography can't be beat for indirect lighting and long shadows on wet decks and cobblestone streets. Ford handles the direction as well as he ever has, which is to say with efficiency and sometimes even poetry. Still, overall, it's a gloomy film with little comedy and Ford probably had trouble with the simple fact that these sailors actually hate the vocation they're hopelessly bound to. None has a family. None has any aspirations beyond further drudgery leading to the next paycheck. And the loyalty they feel is only to their mates, not to their calling.

Worth seeing if only for the great visuals.