you can’t go home again
by
Douglas Messerli
Dudley
Nichols (screenplay, based on the plays “The Moon of the Caribees,” “In The
Zone,” “Bound East for Cardiff,” and “The Long Voyage Home” by Eugene O’Neill)
John Ford (director) The Long Voyage
Home / 1940
As
I’ve expressed earlier, I’ve always thought the Eugene O’Neill’s SS Glencairn plays as slightly tacky
theater, filled with a wide range of types (a brooding Englishman, a Swede, an
Irishman, an American named “Yank,” etc.) who, in the playwright’s original
script speak in accents that not only represent stereotypical attitudes about
their cultural differences that are quite painfully inaccurate.
The production I recently saw at REDCAT
by The Wooster Group changed much of that, while quite literally “accentuating”
it and giving full force to the actual narratives O’Neill was attempting to
tell. If it didn’t always work, it sheds new insights on the original short
plays, revealing the dreams and desires of these sometimes stock characters,
such as the relationship between Yank and Driscoll.
Accordingly, I thought it necessary to
see the film version, rendered by the admirable director, John Ford. At first,
I must admit, I was a bit leery of his updating of the tale to World War II,
and his casting of Thomas Mitchell as Driscoll, Ward Bond as Yank, and, almost
incomprehensibly, the Iowa-born actor with a drawling plainsman accent, John
Wayne, as Ole Olsen, the simple-minded Swede who just wants to go home.
Can you blame him, given that the
Glencairn is presented as vessel of bondage and servitude, upon which
authorities have dumped a cargo of high explosives to be delivered up to England
for the War? These men are rightfully terrified and, at first, quite forcibly
rebel.
Like so many of Ford’s movies, the rest
of this work is an almost all male-tribute to survival and the deep-bonding of
heterosexual men, with an occasional nod to the homoerotic possibilities that
lie just beneath their hard-living love. This is Ford’s territory, and despite
O’Neill’s sometimes clumsy and adolescent gestures, he transforms the play,
with the help of screenwriter Dudley Nichols and cinematographer Gregg Toland, into
a quite successful film, wherein these men gradually grow to respect and love
their fellowmen.
If the Conrad-like character, Smitty (Ian
Hunter), in his insistent isolation from their raucous activities, may briefly
appear to them as a Nazi-spy, the discovery of his love-letters between him and
his wife, sadly reveal his real struggle with alcoholism, giving us a glimpse
of a character who—given what we later learn about O’Neill family member’s
problems—who is soon killed off by the author in a German plane attack on their
ship. Smitty might have been one of the more interesting characters of this
film had he been given a chance, but O’Neill was taking no chances, given the
self-destruction of both his beloved brother and father.
Even the crew’s betrayals—when the ship’s
agent spikes Ole’s drink when he is about to head off in another ship, the
Amindra,
back home to Sweden—prove positive, when he is unknowingly saved from being killed
when the vessel is torpedoed by the Germans. When he and his fellow sailors
hear the news, they know they are all damned to sign on again. There appears to
other way out this indentured servitude.
These sailors are trapped within their
lives, and there appears no way out except, like the men of Ulysses’ endless
voyages, to move on from port to port, from adventure to adventure without any
meaningful purpose in their lives.
This is Ford’s territory, and he presents
it quite effectively, despite O’Neill’s best intentions to create an
expressionist voyage of men-on-the-run. O’Neill knew only too well what Thomas
Wolfe later wailed, “you can’t go home again.”
Los Angeles,
October 21, 2013
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