[This post delayed two full days by the fact that we had no electricity, therefore no internet for stupid reasons. Also, I appear to have gotten sick on top of being sick. Happy autumnal equinox and break-fast Yom Kippur.]
I don't know what it says about me right now that my comfort viewing is Eugene O'Neill. But I loved The Long Voyage Home (1940) when I discovered it on TCM in 2008 and it looked even better in 35mm at the HFA in 2010 and it was just on TCM again, so I watched it. It remains one of my favorite movies, easily my favorite by John Ford and one of the best I know about the sea. The first time around, it reminded me at once of Kipling; it reminds me of Conrad now that I've read more of him. It's a few months in the life of a tramp steamer in the spring of 1940 and it's one of the movies I love so much, I have trouble talking about it. I might as well try.
Eugene O'Neill's theatrical debut was a one-act play called Bound East for Cardiff (1914), set in "[t]he seamen's forecastle of the British tramp steamer Glencairn on a foggy night midway on the voyage between New York and Cardiff" and memorably first performed in a former fishhouse in Provincetown in 1916. It was followed by three further one-acts set aboard the Glencairn, In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and Moon of the Caribbees (1918), each taking another snapshot of life in the tramp trade. I have mixed feelings about the Glencairn plays. They're atmospheric, character-driven, and absolutely soaked through with the sea; they're also riddled with eye dialect and emotionally uneven. For every unsentimental observation, there's a haul at the heartstrings or a heavy-handed irony. The two most plotted plays, In the Zone and The Long Voyage Home, are the most unwieldy. It's possible I'd have liked the cycle more if I'd discovered it before seeing the film, but coming to it afterward I found myself less attracted to the original material than professionally impressed by Dudley Nichols' successful braiding and strengthening of all four stories into an episodic but not patchwork script. Some of the changes are structural and expedient, like explicitly folding the action of the four plays into the same voyage and reordering their chronology so that the Glencairn moves from a comparative idyll in the Caribbean through the war zone of the North Atlantic before making port in blacked-out Blitz London. Others significantly alter the tone and import of the story, like the one I'll discuss under the cut because it's one of the reasons the film got my attention. The resulting screenplay has an appropriately oceanic rhythm, rising and falling without ever starting anywhere in particular or coming to a true close: we watch small stories crest and break and wash back into the daily life of the SS Glencairn, and the sea goes on around them and someone is always coming home. The tidal effect is reinforced by Richard Hageman's score with its alternating motifs of sentimental songs and chanteys, especially "Harbor Lights" and "Blow the Man Down." One is the wistful pull of the land and all the nostalgia it represents, the other is the recklessness of the sea, both exhilarating and perilous—the endless ebb and flood of the seagoing life. Other melodies make cameos as needed, sometimes diegetic, sometimes evoked through the soundtrack as though only in the characters' heads. Finally, visually, it's just a very beautiful film. Most of the scenes at sea are done with rear projection, but Gregg Toland gives the decks and the fo'c'sle of the imaginary Glencairn a documentary look with his deep-focus photography—a year ahead of Citizen Kane—shadowed as evocatively as film noir without ever sacrificing the heavy glitter of wet tarpaulins or the blank glare of electric light. Low-angle, wide-angle shots emphasize the claustrophobia of shipboard life, the close quarters and the isolation which the audience comes to take for granted along with the crew. Even when the camera moves abovedecks, a sight of the sky is little relief when it's a grey blustery squall or when it's crossed by the shadows of enemy planes. What we see of the land is shipyards, quays, cobbled rain-glistening streets and waterfront dives. The original plays make a point of the hard-luck, rootless lives of the Glencairn's crew, but John Ford and company have even less time for the romance of the sea.
They have time for the characters, though, without whom everything I've described would be evocative but static, like the portraits painted of the film during production. It's an entirely character-actor cast. The closest thing to a star in the ensemble is John Wayne and he's not the protagonist—there really isn't one, although there are five or six characters who come to center stage as the story shifts around them. Coming off the banner year of 1939, Thomas Mitchell is the best I've ever seen him as the bosun Driscoll, a burly Irishman with a singularly charming smile who can pat a crewmate on the cheek and punch him the next minute; that's a high-spirited brawling archetype, but the film then allows him to be seen as genuinely courageous, protective of his shipmates, and sometimes fatally wrong. Wayne underplays nicely as Ole Olsen, a sweet-tempered farmer's kid from Stockholm who always means to go back to his family, but always blows his pay on his last night ashore and has to sign on again to make the money for his passage home. Ian Hunter's Smitty is a mystery, a hard-drinking Englishman who signed on at Cape Town with the clothes on his back: no one knows much about him and he seems to want it that way. Arthur Shields' Donkeyman doesn't get a plot to himself, but he's the closest the film has to a philosophical center, the ship's oldest sailor and a bit of an oracle in wire-rimmed glasses and salt-stained denim. He never goes ashore. He has no illusions that his home is anywhere but the Glencairn.1 Ward Bond's Yank is a magician with smoke rings, not invulnerable. John Qualen's Axel plays the flute like a fiery Scandinavian faun. Mildred Natwick steals every second of her first screen role as a conflicted B-girl in a crimp's den straight out of "Paddy Lay Back." Even the Glencairn's captain is a person, with his acne scars and his receding dark hair; he's introduced not as the brass-buttoned emblem of his office, but a middle-aged man sweating in his shirtsleeves, fiddling with the wireless for news of the war. He's Wilfrid Lawson, a far cry from Alfie Doolittle. I enjoy the film just for the chance to watch these people all together, for once not in the background. They're given some really interesting things to do.
( All's well, Smitty? )
I don't know if any of this explains what it is that I love so much about the movie. Perhaps it's just that the sea will outlast everyone in the story, and everyone who watches it, too. It is full of spray and salt and time and the choices people make matter, but it matters more that the tide keeps coming around. It's full of loss and I find it deeply calming to spend time with. The internet tells me that Criterion has the rights to The Long Voyage Home. Is there a nicely restored DVD yet? No, there's streaming on Hulu. Damn it, Criterion. These are not equivalent forms of transmission. O'Neill supposedly had his own print and watched it until it wore out. I never want to have to imitate Eugene O'Neill in anything. This resolution courtesy of my supportive backers at Patreon.
1. He informed my poem "The Coast Guard."
2. I'm aware he's something more unusual in Strange Cargo (1940), and I know he made some British silents with Hitchcock and some quota quickies with Michael Powell, but I haven't seen any of them yet. I still think his work in The Long Voyage Home will hold up.
3. I warned you about the eye dialect. Be glad I didn't quote the character with the Cockney accent.
I don't know what it says about me right now that my comfort viewing is Eugene O'Neill. But I loved The Long Voyage Home (1940) when I discovered it on TCM in 2008 and it looked even better in 35mm at the HFA in 2010 and it was just on TCM again, so I watched it. It remains one of my favorite movies, easily my favorite by John Ford and one of the best I know about the sea. The first time around, it reminded me at once of Kipling; it reminds me of Conrad now that I've read more of him. It's a few months in the life of a tramp steamer in the spring of 1940 and it's one of the movies I love so much, I have trouble talking about it. I might as well try.
Eugene O'Neill's theatrical debut was a one-act play called Bound East for Cardiff (1914), set in "[t]he seamen's forecastle of the British tramp steamer Glencairn on a foggy night midway on the voyage between New York and Cardiff" and memorably first performed in a former fishhouse in Provincetown in 1916. It was followed by three further one-acts set aboard the Glencairn, In the Zone (1917), The Long Voyage Home (1917), and Moon of the Caribbees (1918), each taking another snapshot of life in the tramp trade. I have mixed feelings about the Glencairn plays. They're atmospheric, character-driven, and absolutely soaked through with the sea; they're also riddled with eye dialect and emotionally uneven. For every unsentimental observation, there's a haul at the heartstrings or a heavy-handed irony. The two most plotted plays, In the Zone and The Long Voyage Home, are the most unwieldy. It's possible I'd have liked the cycle more if I'd discovered it before seeing the film, but coming to it afterward I found myself less attracted to the original material than professionally impressed by Dudley Nichols' successful braiding and strengthening of all four stories into an episodic but not patchwork script. Some of the changes are structural and expedient, like explicitly folding the action of the four plays into the same voyage and reordering their chronology so that the Glencairn moves from a comparative idyll in the Caribbean through the war zone of the North Atlantic before making port in blacked-out Blitz London. Others significantly alter the tone and import of the story, like the one I'll discuss under the cut because it's one of the reasons the film got my attention. The resulting screenplay has an appropriately oceanic rhythm, rising and falling without ever starting anywhere in particular or coming to a true close: we watch small stories crest and break and wash back into the daily life of the SS Glencairn, and the sea goes on around them and someone is always coming home. The tidal effect is reinforced by Richard Hageman's score with its alternating motifs of sentimental songs and chanteys, especially "Harbor Lights" and "Blow the Man Down." One is the wistful pull of the land and all the nostalgia it represents, the other is the recklessness of the sea, both exhilarating and perilous—the endless ebb and flood of the seagoing life. Other melodies make cameos as needed, sometimes diegetic, sometimes evoked through the soundtrack as though only in the characters' heads. Finally, visually, it's just a very beautiful film. Most of the scenes at sea are done with rear projection, but Gregg Toland gives the decks and the fo'c'sle of the imaginary Glencairn a documentary look with his deep-focus photography—a year ahead of Citizen Kane—shadowed as evocatively as film noir without ever sacrificing the heavy glitter of wet tarpaulins or the blank glare of electric light. Low-angle, wide-angle shots emphasize the claustrophobia of shipboard life, the close quarters and the isolation which the audience comes to take for granted along with the crew. Even when the camera moves abovedecks, a sight of the sky is little relief when it's a grey blustery squall or when it's crossed by the shadows of enemy planes. What we see of the land is shipyards, quays, cobbled rain-glistening streets and waterfront dives. The original plays make a point of the hard-luck, rootless lives of the Glencairn's crew, but John Ford and company have even less time for the romance of the sea.
They have time for the characters, though, without whom everything I've described would be evocative but static, like the portraits painted of the film during production. It's an entirely character-actor cast. The closest thing to a star in the ensemble is John Wayne and he's not the protagonist—there really isn't one, although there are five or six characters who come to center stage as the story shifts around them. Coming off the banner year of 1939, Thomas Mitchell is the best I've ever seen him as the bosun Driscoll, a burly Irishman with a singularly charming smile who can pat a crewmate on the cheek and punch him the next minute; that's a high-spirited brawling archetype, but the film then allows him to be seen as genuinely courageous, protective of his shipmates, and sometimes fatally wrong. Wayne underplays nicely as Ole Olsen, a sweet-tempered farmer's kid from Stockholm who always means to go back to his family, but always blows his pay on his last night ashore and has to sign on again to make the money for his passage home. Ian Hunter's Smitty is a mystery, a hard-drinking Englishman who signed on at Cape Town with the clothes on his back: no one knows much about him and he seems to want it that way. Arthur Shields' Donkeyman doesn't get a plot to himself, but he's the closest the film has to a philosophical center, the ship's oldest sailor and a bit of an oracle in wire-rimmed glasses and salt-stained denim. He never goes ashore. He has no illusions that his home is anywhere but the Glencairn.1 Ward Bond's Yank is a magician with smoke rings, not invulnerable. John Qualen's Axel plays the flute like a fiery Scandinavian faun. Mildred Natwick steals every second of her first screen role as a conflicted B-girl in a crimp's den straight out of "Paddy Lay Back." Even the Glencairn's captain is a person, with his acne scars and his receding dark hair; he's introduced not as the brass-buttoned emblem of his office, but a middle-aged man sweating in his shirtsleeves, fiddling with the wireless for news of the war. He's Wilfrid Lawson, a far cry from Alfie Doolittle. I enjoy the film just for the chance to watch these people all together, for once not in the background. They're given some really interesting things to do.
( All's well, Smitty? )
I don't know if any of this explains what it is that I love so much about the movie. Perhaps it's just that the sea will outlast everyone in the story, and everyone who watches it, too. It is full of spray and salt and time and the choices people make matter, but it matters more that the tide keeps coming around. It's full of loss and I find it deeply calming to spend time with. The internet tells me that Criterion has the rights to The Long Voyage Home. Is there a nicely restored DVD yet? No, there's streaming on Hulu. Damn it, Criterion. These are not equivalent forms of transmission. O'Neill supposedly had his own print and watched it until it wore out. I never want to have to imitate Eugene O'Neill in anything. This resolution courtesy of my supportive backers at Patreon.
1. He informed my poem "The Coast Guard."
2. I'm aware he's something more unusual in Strange Cargo (1940), and I know he made some British silents with Hitchcock and some quota quickies with Michael Powell, but I haven't seen any of them yet. I still think his work in The Long Voyage Home will hold up.
3. I warned you about the eye dialect. Be glad I didn't quote the character with the Cockney accent.
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