THE CINEMA
" The Long Voyage Home." At the Gaumont.--" Seven Sinners." At the Odeon.
THE cinema and the theatre have little more in common than their rows of seats, and the consequence is that successful plays rarely make first-rate films. Such exceptions as there are, how- ever, reveal a capacity on the part of the film to take over and even to elucidate the emotional atmosphere of an original stage version. The Petrified Forest and Winterset are two films which can lay claim to have beaten on their own ground the plays from which they came. Yet, in spite of their success in creating an environment of illusion appropriate to their stories, they remained handicapped by stage conventions implicit in the stories.
The Long Voyage Home solves the problem cleverly. The atmosphere of Eugene O'Neill's plays of the sea exists here more potently than on the stage, and at the same time the story avoids an inhibiting theatrical shape by utilising, not a single play, but a combination of four. In a sense the screen story has no beginning and no end. It is a part of a small slice of a very long tale which begins and ends far beyond the limits of the film. On the screen you see no more than the voyage of a tramp-steamer's crew across the Atlantic, with a day at each end to register the impact of the land upon the moods which come from the sea. The film is packed with intensely dramatic episodes. As a result of them, the bedraggled crew, reassembling at the end of the film for the next voyage, have lost four of their number—three by bloodshed and one by escape from the sea to life on the land, that fading dream of all but one of these simple-hearted but violent men. The drama is episodic—even the fact that the ship carries a cargo of munitions and is attacked by a Nazi bomber is merely one of a number of incidental episodes, some of which are dramatically convincing and others artificial and stilted. The inadequacy of these latter episodes scarcely affects the film as a whole. For The Long Voyage Home is concerned primarily with what the S.S. Glencairn ' does to the minds and the spirits of those men who are fated to spend most of their lives aboard her or other ships of her kind. In contrast with such subject-matter, a world-war is as academic as a history book, and the director has taken no care even to ensure accuracy of detail in the war scenes. The British agent who arranges the shipment of munitions is treated on board the Glencairn ' as a sententious and hypo- critical old gas-bag, and the seamen make no secret of the fact that their first concern is with the more permanent problems of their trade. That these problems are only indirectly economic, and have more to do with wine, women and weather is a sufficient indication that the film is on a plane of realism which is scarcely documentary. Gregg Toland's brilliantly stylised photography provides further evidence, if more were needed, that this is a studio picture and unashamed of it. The out-of-door scenes are never naturalistic, and although the storm sequence is terrifying in spite of it, this is because the violence of the film is presented always subjectively—it is through the men that we see and feel the private and personal conflicts which lie deeper than the fisticuffs and the broken bodies.
John Ford is the only American director who could have succeeded so brilliantly in this beautiful film. It is nearer in kind to his early picture, The Informer, than to The Grapes of Wrath (still his greatest work), but it reveals that his experience with the more factual subject-matter of the last-named film has immensely strengthened his hand in the " atmospheric" type of picture. He uses sound with much greater skill than before. The sentimental melodies and the monotonously recurring rhythms are still there, but also there is a new use of natural sound. For example the creak of the ship—metal-creak uneasily vying with the creak of shifting timbers. Listen to it. It is the sound which never ceases inside a ship.
The cast seems to contain most of the actors one would like to see in such a film. Thomas Mitchell is outstanding, but he is closely followed by Wilfrid Lawson as a captain who hates the sea and who, by force of circumstances and tradition, must stifle any hint of affection for his men.
The women in The Long Voyage Home are of no importance and so in order to preserve a balance one should also visit Seven Sinners. Here nothing is of any importance except Marlene Dietrich. By looking lovelier than ever and starting a bar-room fight to finish all screen fights (sadism becoming fantasy) she has made a picture to suit several sorts and conditions of men.
EDGAR ANSTEY.
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