Plymouth Adventure (1952)

(On Cable TV, September 2020) As a Canadian, there are a few pieces of American mythology that confound me, and the Mayflower is one of them. I know that Thanksgiving comes from its pilgrims, and so does part of the American overinflated sense of democracy. Never mind that it was a mere drop in the massive immigration waves that truly made America, that the American Revolution was far more crucial to its system of government or that Thanksgiving is a bit of a hollow celebration as we come to grips with colonization. But Plymouth Adventure goes all-in to mythologize the trip in celluloid form, featuring none other than Spencer Tracy as the captain of the ship ferrying the pilgrims to the new world. The journey is interminable for both the pilgrims and the audience, as the film overstuffs itself with an ensemble cast and several dramatic deviations from historical fact. There are romantic entanglements, deaths, storms and that stuff—with special effects so good at the time that they netted an Oscar. Dramatically, though, Plymouth Adventure is a bit of a bore. It’s so deeply convinced of the value of its story that it fails to make a case for its importance. The style of the film is typical of early 1950s bombast, although I fear what would have happened if they had made this film a few years later, just as 1950s films took on epic scope and length in order to outclass television. I don’t mean to imply that Plymouth Adventure is a bad movie—you can still watch it today and appreciate the result, as well as be thrilled at some of the storm sequences. But it’s self-satisfied in a way that limits its appeal to non-Americans—or even Americans who don’t buy into the white Pilgrim myth as the birth of the nation.