The Long Gray Line (1955)

Director: John Ford                                       Writer: Edward Hope
Film Score: George Dunning                          Cinematography: Charles Lawton Jr.
Starring: Tyrone Power, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp and Robert Francis

The Long Gray Line is sentimentalized story of the life of a West Point sergeant. John Ford is at the helm, but even with his gravitas he can’t save it from descending into schmaltz. Tyrone Power isn’t any more convincing with his Irish brogue than Orson Welles was in The Lady from Shanghai. It’s a widescreen Technicolor dud of a film that boasts a ton of character actors but can’t seem to get it’s bloated expectations off the ground. The film is based on the autobiography of Marty Maher, and the title is a reference to the continuation of the tradition at the school and the gray uniforms the cadets wear. Producer Jerry Wald originally planed to make the film at RKO but the studio felt that his price was too high and declined. Wald eventually managed to convince Columbia to purchase the rights and John Ford was brought in to direct. This was Ford’s first film after undergoing eye surgery and it was the first film he shot in CinemaScope. The production also received permission from the school and the exteriors were shot on the West Point campus.

Tyrone Power plays an aging West Point sergeant whom the military wants to retire. In desperation he goes to see President Eisenhower to ask to keep his job. Once there, he tells the story of coming to the U.S. from Ireland in 1905 and working as a busboy in the school chow hall. After falling too far into debt from breaking dishes, he takes his citizenship test and enlists as a cadet. His nemesis in these early days is corporal Peter Graves, but there are plenty of other corny turn-of-the-century cadets like Martin Milner to go around. When he decks Graves, he gets transferred to Ward Bond’s sports outfit and falls in love with an Irish cook, Maureen O’Hara. That is, until he sees her going on a picnic with Graves. It turns out, however, that this was just a ploy by Bond, and when Power proposes she says yes. After a few years O’Hara saves enough money to bring his father, Donald Crip, over from Ireland as well. While Power wants to get out and make his way in the world, circumstances conspire to keep him in West Point for the rest of his career.

Though John Ford’s westerns are some of my favorite films his family dramas, like How Green was my Valley, leave me utterly cold. And this one is no exception. I came to the film through actor Robert Francis, who had been so compelling in The Caine Mutiny. Unfortunately he died in a plane crash after finishing this film. He had been voted one of the screen’s “Promising Personalities” of 1954, but only made four films in his brief career. That alone makes the film worth watching, but little else does. The acting is broad and phony and the characterizations are very one-dimensional. All of the principals seem as if they are on a Broadway stage, yelling their lines and with little actual motivation. Power and O’Hara are Irish stereotypes with absolutely no subtlety. It’s the story of a man who gave his life to an institution, but the audience has absolutely no sense of who he is as an actual man. The Long Gray Line is decidedly not my kind of film but, to paraphrase Abraham Lincoln, for people who like this sort of film this is the sort of film they will like.