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November, 1940
13
The coming of the airplanes in "The Long Voyage Home"
from his crew-mates, with some secret he was trying to forget in drink. In "Bound East for Cardifif". was a man named Yank dying of broken ribs that had punctured his lungs, and as he died he talked with his pal DriscoU about the place he had always wanted to settle down in, far inland away from the sea. In "In the Zone" the ship was stealing throvigh mine-infested waters (this was in 1915) and some innocent but puzzHng doings of Smitty got him suspected of being a spy, till his bunk-mates got hold of some old letters of his and found out the secret, and the tragedy, of his life. In "The Long Voyage Home" the crew was ashore, and a young Swede named Oley was leaving the sea to go back to his old mother and the farm in Sweden, but was shanghaied on to another ship.
Sketchy material, with not much of the stuff of ordinary drama in it, but the kind of thing that John Ford can put his teeth and his heart into. He has had the help of his
best collaborator, Dudley Nichols, to whip these rather talky plays into something really cinematic, and Gregg Toland's vivid camera to catch it for the screen.
It would be hard to say whether there is any definite drama in this inconclusive tale of homeless men on a ship : is the spell of the sea so strong that they can never escape it, though they are always dreaming of settling down in the homes they left or the homes they hope to find, or is there some weakness in themselves they can never shake off that keeps them always roaming, in one ship or another, like vagabond flying Dutchmen? Dudley Nichols has done some clever contriving to knit episodes together and build up peaks of interest and tension, but the story drifts instead of heading for a definite harbor : chance, however exciting the attendant details, is the final disposer of whatever ultimate outcomes there are, and the voyage, for most of the men, is all to be made over again — and yet again. Without Oley,