THE LONG VOYAGE HOME

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 16

THE LONG VOYAGE HOME

(United Artists)

EOPLE who profess to understand a lot about films may often be heard talking knowingly about Such -and Such being a " director’s pic-

ture." Often that means precisely nothing, but if you want to discover what it can mean, I suggest you study a film directed by John Ford. Take this Long Voyage Home. Here‘ the director has worked to a script consisting of three telescoped sea plays by Eugene O’Neill, and this in itself was a handicap, since however expert the telescoping, you can still see the joints pretty plainly. But. the important thing about John Ford, indeed the almost heretical thing about him is that, in spite of this handicap and the fact that he was using a cast of strongly individualistic players, the picture itself remains bigger than the people in it. And this nearly always seems to happen in Ford productions. The extent of the heresy is obvious when one remembers that the first general article of faith in Hollywood is that stars count for everything and that story, direction, and atmosphere are merely incidental to the glorification of the stellar personality. Paradoxically, when the actors are kept subordinate to the picture they usually manage to give better performances than they do under orthodox treatment. They certainly do here. . Because it shows this so plainly, and for several other reasons, I found The Long Voyage Home full of interest (a film trade acquaintance dolefully but probably truthfully described it to me as "a critic’s picture’). At the same time I found it often disappointing and annoying — sometimes maddeningly so. Ford sets out to put the hard impersonal beauty and terror of the sea on to the screen by telling the simple tale of an old British tramp steamer’s voyage from the West Indies to war-time London with a cargo of munitions, and by showing the life of the men aboard; but every now and then he seems to miss the most obvious, simple opportunities to drive his point home. I hope it wasn’t just because they were simple and obvious that he preferred something more subtle and "clever." Admittedly it was necessary for the creation of atmosphere and character to show many apparently irrelevant details of life on shipboard, but allowing for this there doés seem™t6 be a "little too much aimless messing about. The director has also given in rather, too much ‘to the old ‘romantic "tradition ‘which demands that seascapes should be dark

and sinister and that most of the action should take place in a fog. The fog is really a bit thick, particularly when the sailors go ashore in Limehouse; I almost expected an evil Sax Rohmer Chinaman to come padding softly out of the murk. Instead it was an oily-tongued pimp to lead the poor simple sailormen astray. The sea and the ship and the ship’s mission form the central theme of the picture, but running round it and through it (and sometimes a good deal away from it) are a number of individual dramas developing from the characters of the crew-the moody Englishman of obviously better breeding than his mates in the forecastle- who sits mysteriously apart fighting a craving for whisky and is suspected of being a German spy; the fighting Irishman (Thomas Mitchell); the big stupid Swede (John Wayne) who is making his last voyage and who is the envy of the others because he alone has a home to go to; the timid little Swede (John Qualen) who mothers him; and several others equally picturesque. You may well have the feeling that they are real people, and their acting is certainly realistic; but like the sinister fog in Limehouse, they gave me the impression of coming rather more from a play or a book than from real life. As slow-moving for much of the time as the tramp steamer itself, the action speeds up at intervals, with a brawl in a West Indian port and on the Limehouse

docks, and an encounter with Nazi bombers in the war zone. Disappointing, did I call it? And annoying? Yes, but still well worth seeing.