John Ford’s The Long Voyage Home (1940)

Abstract This chapter deals with the 1940 film The Long Voyage Home, directed by ‘America’s Homer’, John Ford, and critically received as ‘a modern Odyssey’. The film is an adaptation of four one-act plays by Eugene O’Neill, known as the Glencairn cycle, which are permeated by a tragic vision of unattainable nostos. Set in the contemporary context of World War II, it dramatizes the SS Glencairn’s perilous voyage home from the West Indies to England, with a cargo of munitions aboard. There is no obvious Odyssean figure in this nostos tale. Instead the members of the steamer’s ragtag international crew represent variations of the same Odyssean longing. Joseph McBride defines the film’s dramatic focus as ‘the archetypal Fordian male conflict between the urge to wander and the yearning for home’. But these men are not so much wanderers as lost souls purgatorially in thrall to the sea.