This is John Ford's other movie from 1940; he won Best Director for the stunning film The Grapes of Wrath the same year. Based on three plays by Eugene O'Neill, it is a solid, surprisingly unsentimental portrait of life in the merchant marine in the days before World War 2. It features beautiful cinematography by Gregg Toland, no-frills direction by Ford, and a great cast.

John Wayne, fresh off his star-making performance in Ford's Stagecoach, plays Ole Olsen, a Swedish sailor equipped with an accent of sorts who is on his last sea voyage before returning home to his mother's farm. You laugh, as I did, but in actuality Wayne sort of pulls it off. He's still young and angular, unsure of himself, not yet the swaggering Duke. The accent is a joke, but Wayne's performance is not.

Like all of John Ford's films, this one is filled with a gaggle of eccentricities on the periphery. Thomas Mitchell plays Driscoll, the spiritual leader of the men, a hard-drinking longtime sailor who takes an almost fatherly liking to Wayne's character. Barry Fitzgerald has little to do but be salty and Irish as Cocky, the oldest crew member. John Qualen is the most annoying personage, appearing in far too many scenes as Axel Swanson, a sailor given to dimwittery and loud complaints.

There's not a strong guiding storyline; instead, the film is constructed of interweaving tales of the various sailors. The most interesting one is that of Smitty (Ian Hunter), whom the other sailors call The Duke. He's obviously not from the same social class as the other sailors; he's reserved, he keeps himself apart. He's an alcoholic, running from whatever life he left behind. We know that he'd rather desert than return to England, but he's prevented from leaving the ship when it docks in the United States and takes on a shipment of explosives for the European War. A series of misunderstandings leads the rest of the crew to suspect him of spying, which leads to the single most devastating scene in the film.

The loneliness of life at sea, something that frankly terrifies me, is the main focus of the film. These men know that their lives are potentially in danger from above and from below, since the ammunition they carry is a prime target for the Nazis—not that the Nazis had qualms about sinking ships that weren't carrying ammunition. They cling to each other fiercely in awkward, manly ways, only interrupted by true expression of feelings when death is near (as in the touching death of Yank, played by Ward Bond).

The episodic nature of the film, which likely reflects the episodic nature of life on a boat, lends itself to good sequences that are isolated from the rest of the film. The Smitty episode is the best, but it is nearly matched by the extended sequence at the end when Ole Olsen, finally within sight of a trip home to his mother, is "escorted" by his shipmates on a final tour of the dockside bars before he departs for his ship. It's played in a large part for comedy—the constant stream of "just one more drink for the road"—but there's a budding desperation that culminates with the jarring last shot of a newspaper floating in the muddy water as the ship pulls away from the dock.

The film was nominated for six Oscars, but didn't win any: Picture, Cinematography, Editing, Special Effects, Original Score, and Screenplay.