Trivia for
The Long Voyage Home (1940) More at IMDbPro »

• John Wayne was asked by director John Ford to play the part of Ole Olson, who was Swedish. Wayne wasn't sure he could pull off the Swedish accent and was worried that the audience would laugh. Ford persuaded him to take the role.
  
  
• "Bound East for Cardiff" opened in Provincetown, Massachusetts on 28 July 1916. "In the Zone" opened in New York on 31 October 1917. "The Long Voyage Home" opened in New York on 2 November 1917. "The Moon of the Caribees" opened in New York on 20 December 1918.
  
  
• Writer Dudley Nichols had to distill four of Eugene O'Neill's one-act plays into one cohesive screenplay.
  
  
• Initially resistant to the idea of working with a Swedish accent, John Wayne was instructed by Danish actress Osa Massen. John Ford later complimented Wayne on his handling of the accent.
  
  
• Eugene O'Neill's favorite film. John Ford gave him a print of it, which O'Neill wore out.
  
  
• The first spoken dialogue occurs nearly five minutes into the film.
  
  
• The name of Arthur Shields' character, "Donkeyman", is a nickname for the job he performed, the sole caretaker of the ship's single-piston "Donkey" engine.
  
  
• Barry Fitzgerald, who plays the character of Cocky, and Arthur Shields, who played Donkeyman, were brothers in real life. They also appeared together in director John Ford's The Quiet Man (1952).
  
  
• Producer Walter Wanger contracted with Reeves Lewenthal, director of the American Associated Artists Gallery in Manhattan, to have nine of it's artists go out to Hollywood during the filming and paint scenes from the movie and portraits of the actors in character as a publicity stunt for the film. "High Brow Publicity" as Time magazine dubbed it in a story from August 26, 1940. The artists (and their paintings) included Thomas Hart Benton (Shore Leave), Grant Wood (Sentimental Ballad), Ernest Fiene (portrait of John Wayne as Ole Olson), George Schreiber (scene from the film with Mitchell, Qualen and two others), Luis Quintanilla (The Bumboat Girls), George Biddle (portrait of Qualen as Squarehead Swanson), Robert Philipp (portrait of Thomas Mitchell as Drisk Driscoll), Raphael Soyer and James Chapin-all well known in art circles at the time. Wanger paid $50,000 and ended up with 12 canvases-including a portrait of Wanger by Ernest Fiene. The paintings were featured in Life magazine and, after an exhibition that opened in New York City in August 1940, went on to tour 23 museums across America.
  
  

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