[The Long Voyage Home] is neither a war movie nor an adventure sea story. It belongs, rather, to that great class of works of art which deal with the eternal human quest—the Odyssey, the Holy Grail romances, Moby Dick, Kafka's Castle, perhaps The Old Man and the Sea. In all of them man is presented as traveling some long, weary road in order to attain a supremely desired objective. The various specific elements in the film are interpretable as expressive of this theme. They delineate the human condition—not just in the merchant marine, or in a century of war and revolution, or in any other particular social circumstances. The symbol, to be sure, is specific, but not what it symbolizes: man's situation in this world and in relation to other men.

The film begins with the explicit statement that it is a saga of the changing...