Plymouth Adventure, a 1952 film with Spencer Tracy and Gene Tierney, is not a great movie. But as the story of the Pilgrims’ passage on the Mayflower it appears every season around Thanksgiving. It’s melodramatic and somewhat dated but still warmly moving and instructive. Tracy, true to his own real-life personality, effectively portrays a grumpy, unlikeable, and chronically depressed but competent Captain Christopher Jones, who meanly accepts a bribe to deliver the Pilgrims to chilly Massachusetts rather than the desired southerly Virginia.
Captain Jones also makes no secret of his trans-Atlantic lust for Gene Tierney, the primly attractive Dorothy Bradford, wife of Pilgrim leader William Bradford, who nobly suppresses her own hankerings for the bawdy captain, while hoping to save his despondent soul.
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