One Year After Stagecoach, John Wayne & John Ford Made A 100% RT Best Picture Nominee

Just one year after Stagecoach, John Ford and John Wayne reteamed for an underappreciated gem that now boasts a 100% score on Rotten Tomatoes, The Long Voyage Home. Altogether, Ford and Wayne collaborated on 14 movies, with their first being 1939’s Stagecoach, the now-iconic film that set the stage for Wayne’s takeover of the Western genre.

Their partnership continued on-and-off for years, with it really picking up in 1948 when they made two great Westerns in one year, Fort Apache and 3 Godfathers, thus setting in motion a string of great Ford-Wayne collaborations that lasted through the 1950s and beyond.

The films from this period of their respective careers – plus Stagecoach – earn the lion’s share of the attention when it comes to their shared filmography. As a result, one particular contribution to cinema often goes unnoticed.

Long Voyage Home Was A Box Office Failure, But A Solid Outing From John Wayne & John Ford

A year later, John Ford directed The Long Voyage Home, a drama about a group of people aboard a British ship at the onset of World War II. The film dealt the trials and emotional struggles the passengers and crew experienced together while they awaited their return to their homes.

In the film, John Wayne played Ole, a young Swedish man and one of the passengers on the vessel. Although he has top billing here, the real lead is Thomas Mitchell’s Driscoll, who comes to Ole’s rescue in The Long Voyage Home’s climax when people from another ship try to capture him for their own purposes.

The Long Voyage Home was ultimately light on action and may have been a disappointment for those hoping for something more akin to Stagecoach from Ford and Wayne. But what it lacked in action it made up for in worthwhile character drama, including a solid performance from Wayne, who portrayed a likable, good-natured man with a pet parrot.

Unfortunately, The Long Voyage Home bombed at the box office. However, it did fare well with critics, and even boasted several Oscar nominations, including one for Best Picture. That’s consistent with its current reputation, given that it sports a 100% rating on Rotten Tomatoes.

Long Voyage Home Was An Early Acting Challenge For John Wayne

Characters from the World War II movie The Long Voyage Home (1940)

According to John Wayne: The Life and the Legend by Scott Eyman, the demands of playing Ole in The Long Voyage Home marked a significant challenge for Wayne as an actor. Firstly, Ole was Swedish, and this prompted Wayne to seek out coaching on the dialect.

But Wayne’s concerns for playing Ole went deeper than the character’s Swedish identity; Eyman argues that at this time, Wayne had settled on a “public strategy” of pretending that he didn’t see himself as a real actor. That made sense, considering that the cowboys he played throughout the 1930s weren’t necessarily deep, well-developed characters.

But Ole, as Eyman notes in the book, was a rather “sensitive” role, and thus called for a more emotional performance from Wayne. The Long Voyage Home took him out of his comfort zone, and later became one of several movies to offer something a bit different from “the Duke.“