OVP: The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Film: The Long Voyage Home (1940)
Stars: John Wayne, Thomas Mitchell, Ian Hunter, Barry Fitzgerald, Wilfrid Lawson, Mildred Natwick, Ward Bond
Director: John Ford
Oscar History: 6 nominations (Best Picture, Adapted Screenplay, Special Effects, Film Editing, Score, Cinematography)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Sometimes when we're doing these theme week write-ups we're getting arguably the most important nomination for a film (particularly when it's an acting week), or in many cases it's perhaps the only nomination.  That's not the case today.  While The Long Voyage Home was definitely cited for Best Editing, and therefore is a legitimate inclusion in this week's theme, you'll notice nominations for Best Picture & Adapted Screenplay that seem a bit more "headline-y" in terms of this movie.  The film, one of the lesser-known Best Picture nominees from perennial Oscar contender John Ford, the film was a bit of a departure for the director.  After all, it wasn't made at Fox (it was for United Artists), and was a downer compared to some of the major hits he'd had in the previous two years like Stagecoach, Young Mr. Lincoln, and The Grapes of Wrath, arguably his finest movie to that point.  The Long Voyage Home did not equal these film's successes at the box office (it didn't turn a profit), but Ford would be back pretty quickly with the massive success of How Green Was My Valley to prove his value to Hollywood.  However, financial success isn't always indicative of a film's quality, and Ford never made an uninteresting picture, so I was excited to embark on this viewing.

(Spoilers Ahead) The movie is based on a series of plays by Eugene O'Neill, and tells the tale of a motley crew of men who are on a British Tramp Steamer, headed from the Caribbean to England during the very early stages of World War II.  The men aboard all have different dreams for themselves, from get-rich-quick-schemes to sex with the women they meet in ports to the most wholesome of the bunch, Ole Olsen (Wayne), who simply wants to go home to his Swedish mother.  The men, though, don't have an easy lot-in-life, or an easy voyage, as they are traveling with dynamite, which could explode in the rough seas, and along the way they will have to travel through English waters that are under attack.  As the film goes, we learn more about the men, and they learn about each other, particularly what they're capable of as one of them dies during a storm (Bond), and another (Hunter) is accused (unjustly) of being a German spy, when in reality his secret alcoholism has caused him so much shame he's been driven to this dangerous life even with a wife begging him to come home (he, of course, dies, as these are based on O'Neill plays).  In the end, happiness is only there for Ole, sent home but in the process dooming the fate of another sailor, and the rest of the men reluctantly return to sea, knowing they do not have the luxury of an escape from its grasp.

It's easy to see why The Long Voyage Home was not a hit in its day despite the presence of both Ford & Wayne.  The film is dark-even Ole, the sweet, lovable man who has women flocking to have sex with him, at one point is drugged in hopes of kidnapping him onto a boat crew before he's rescued, and the movie isn't shy about telling us the tales of these men & their horrors at sea.  The sequence where Thomas Mitchell's Drisk reads Hunter's Smitty's letters, assuming they contain evidence of Smitty being a spy but in reality its from a wife begging her husband to forgive himself & come home to her (and the subsequent moment where Smitty of course dies before he can absolve himself to her), will make you cry, and this is a movie that doesn't indulge sentiment.  The story's a bit broad, the first twenty minutes drag a bit, and Wayne's Swedish accent is, to put it charitably, ill-advised.  But this is pretty much the definition of a hidden gem, the sort of movie that you start watching at midnight & can't put down.

The film received six Academy Awards, and I honestly wouldn't begrudge any of them, even if they're earned to varying degrees.  The Special Effects are cool, though not particularly groundbreaking (the big scenes that got this nomination are the gigantic, swirling storm that kills Ward Bond's character, and the later attacks on the ship that kill Hunter's), and the Score is sturdy but unmemorable.  The screenplay is an achievement, though-even with the sloppy first twenty minutes, it melds together four different O'Neill plays (no easy feat), and the editing helps with that, making the chapters seamless while still connected.  Editing is the "invisible art," which isn't the case here (we know when one script ends & begins more because of tell-tale cuts), but the movie isn't shy about bringing out sequences showing the physicality of this life rather than just dialogue shots, and that wasn't the case even in all of Ford's work, much less most work of the era.

The best nomination was the Cinematography.  I didn't know that this was lensed by Gregg Toland, who was the most important cinematographer of the 1940's, and it was done the year before Toland's masterwork Citizen Kane.  If you've seen Citizen Kane as much as I have, you'll notice similarities in the way that Toland uses deep focus techniques, and really plays with light & size on the screen in a way that we normally attribute to Citizen Kane as being the pioneer of, but it's proved here that Toland was already starting to perfect these techniques in previous movies.  The effect is marvelous-The Long Voyage Home is breathtaking, particularly the way that it uses bright & shadow, where even a man running in the dark can be just staggering (I picked the top photo as an example to exhibit, this, rather than where we'd customarily go with a glossy shot of Wayne in the movie).  If you see this, and you should, notice how glorious the camerawork is here, and pity me for having to pick between this, Waterloo Bridge, and Rebecca when we get to this OVP writeup.