Review of The Long Voyage Home

This movie is the dark side of "The Quiet Man," except that John Wayne's role is very small here. First, there are about a dozen actors in this movie who later were in supporting roles in The Quiet Man. However, John Ford had not figured out what to do with these wonderful character actors to make them shine in this film. In this movie he has them overplay their parts to the cringe point for the audience. Perhaps it played better in 1940, but I think that Ford just got it wrong here. Consider how excellently acted "Stagecoach" was, and that was 1939, the year prior to this movie. While there are a few good moments here (Ward Bond has a terrific scene, as does Ian Hunter), this movie is painfully slow. We debated turning it off a few times, but thought that it must get better because it had such good reviews on IMDb. Wrong! Finally, we fast-forwarded it on the DVR, and that was the right speed to watch the end. We don't recommend it, unless you insist on seeing all the actors from "The Quiet Man" when they were 12 years younger.