Plymouth Adventure ** (1952, Spencer Tracy, Gene Tierney, Van Johnson, Leo Genn) – Classic Movie Review 9398

Director Clarence Brown’s 1952 film Plymouth Adventure is MGM’s costly, sincere and well made but oddly unexciting slab of history about the Pilgrim Fathers’ voyage from Plymouth in 1620 on the Mayflower and their hardships when they land in Plymouth, Massachusetts.

Spencer Tracy looks unhappy as the ship’s skipper, Captain Christopher Jones, and it also stars Gene Tierney as Dorothy Bradford, Van Johnson as John Alden, and Leo Genn as William Bradford.

Plymouth Adventure is nobody’s finest hour but there are some decent scenes and the odd good performance, as well as a typically painstaking MGM production and attractive Technicolor cinematography by William Daniels, though it was a flop at the box office and with some critics, some of whom called it a ‘Thanksgiving turkey’. Miscasting and a melodramatic, unhistorical script are the main problems, along with Tracy’s uneasy, unemotional performance.

Arnold Gillespie won an Oscar for Best Special Effects.

Helen Deutsch’s screenplay is based on Ernest Gebler’s novel.

Also in the cast are Dawn Addams, Lloyd Bridges, Barry Jones, John Dehner, Rhys Williams, Noel Drayton, Tommy Ivo and Lowell Gilmore.

Plymouth Adventure lost $1.8 million, the first Tracy movie to lose money since he joined MGM in 1935.

Tracy allegedly took a dislike to Peter Lawford and had him fired, to Van Johnson, whose casting was a mistake, and to Addams, saying: ‘Who did she sleep with to get this role?’ He did, however, like Tierney and had an affair with her during filming.

Captain Jones was not the womaniser of the movie, but a happily married family man with eight children. In fact, after landing in Massachusetts, the colonists tried to sail south to Virginia three times but were driven back by storms.

© Derek Winnert 2020 Classic Movie Review 9398

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