Grapes of Wrath final3a

The Grapes of Wrath
John Ford
USA 1940
129m
With Henry Fonda
The movie centers around the large share-cropping Joad family. Henry Fonda as the
hot-tempered Tom Joad, who is just released after serving jail time for manslaughter
and returns to his Oklahoma home where he meets family friend Casy (John Carradine),
a former preacher, who warns Tom that dust storms, crop failures, and new agricultural
methods have financially ruined the once fertile farmland. Upon returning to his family
farm, Tom is greeted by his saddened mother, Ma Joad (Jane Darwell), in their rundown
shack, who tells him that the family decided to go to California to find new hope after
being kicked out of their farm through foreclosure. Already aware that Californians will
be hostile regarding them as competitors for jobs, and seeing for themselves a caravan
of forlorn farmers heading back home after failing to find work. The Joads act with dignity and still journey on in their battered truck along Highway 66.
On the way, their grandfather dies, and they bury him themselves. The grandmother
also keels over, but Ma refuses to tell anyone until they get to California. The family
tries to overcome a series of miserable conditions that plays as a liberal parable against
the economic system that put them into this terrible bind. When Tom kills the thug hired
by the bosses to stop them from union activities, the one who had arbitrarily killed
Casy, he goes on the run and has to say goodbye to his mother. She only asks him
where he'll go. With that, he delivers the film's most remembered speech: "I'll be all
around...Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat...Whenever there's a cop
beating a guy, I'll be there...And when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise and
livin' in the houses they build. I'll be there too." That just about sums up the powerful
punch the film delivered in this intensely drawn realistic drama, rare for a Hollywood
film and one worth remembering for the poetically simple way it gets across its message
without shoving it down your throat and shows how these poor folks were taken advantage of wherever they went.
It's an epic story of people battling on with little hope. A superb film, that hits home
even though the bitter ending is softened. The film tries to be more upbeat than end
like the book on Tom's sister Roseaharn giving birth to a stillborn child and offering her
mother's milk to a starving man in a railroad car. The film has Ma Joad, as the family moves
on without the outcast Tom in search for "twenty days work" near Fresno, California, giving
Pa Joad a stirring Knute Rockne type of pep talk: "Can't wipe us out. Can't lick us. We'll go
on forever. 'Cause we're the people."
Denis Schwartz Ozu's world movie Reviews
This classic Ford film eclipses much of the action of John Steinbeck's well-known novel of the
Oklahoma farmers' migration from the dustbowl to the
California Eden during the Depression years. The Okies were
unwelcome in California, of course; they threatened the jobs
of the locals. The brutal police hassled and harassed them
unmercifully. The migrants formed unions in self-defence and
struck for decent fruit-picking wages. This inevitably multiplied the official violence. Ford's film, shot by Gregg Toland
with magnificent, lyrical simplicity, captures the stark plainness of the migrants, stripped to a few possessions, left with
innumerable relations and little hope.
MH Time Out London
The ideological journey of the hero, Tom Joad, can be seen by the two killings he is responsible for. The first one takes place in a saloon before the action begins, and Tom describes it
to a former preacher: "We was drunk. He got a knife in me and I laid him out with a shovel.
Knocked his head plum to squash." After serving four years, Tom is paroled and returns to
his family farm in Oklahoma, only to learn the Joads have been "tractored off the land" and
are joining the desperate migration to California. Near the end of the film, after seeing
deputies and thugs beat and shoot at strikers, he is once again attacked, this time by a "tin
badge" with a club. He snatches away the club, and kills him. The lesson is clear: Tom has
learned who his real enemies are, and is working now with more deserving targets.
The movie was based on John Steinbeck's novel, arguably the most effective social document of the 1930s, and it was directed by a filmmaker who had done more than any other
to document the Westward movement of American settlement. John Ford was the director
of "The Iron Horse" (1924), about the dream of a railroad to the West, and made many
other films about the white migration into Indian lands, including his Cavalry trilogy ("Fort
Apache," "She Wore a Yellow Ribbon," "Rio Grande"). "The Grapes of Wrath" tells the sad
end of the dream. The small shareholders who staked their claims 50 years earlier are
forced off their land by bankers and big landholders. "Who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle
Company?" asks Muley, a neighbor of the Joads who refuses to sell. "It ain't anybody," says
a land agent. "It's a company."
The movie finds a larger socialist
lesson in this, when Tom tells Ma:
"One guy with a million acres and
a hundred thousand farmers
starvin'." Of course Tom didn't
know the end of the story, about
how the Okies would go to work in
war industries and their children
would prosper more in California
than they would have in Oklahoma, and their grandchildren would
star in Beach Boys songs. It is easy to forget that for many, "The Grapes of Wrath" had a
happy, unwritten, fourth act.
When Steinbeck published his novel in 1939, it was acclaimed as a masterpiece, won the
Pulitzer Prize, was snatched up by Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox and assigned to his
top director, John Ford. It expressed the nation's rage about the Depression in poetic, Biblical
terms, and its dialogue does a delicate little dance around words like "agitators" and “Reds”who are, we are intended to understand, what the fat cats call anyone who stands up for the
little man. With Hitler rising in Europe, Communism would enjoy a brief respite from the
American demonology.
The movie won Oscars for best director and best actress (Jane Darwell as Ma Joad) and was
nominated for five others, including best actor (Henry Fonda) and best picture (it lost to
Hitchcock's "Rebecca"). In a year when there were 10 best film nominees Ford had even
another entry, "The Long Voyage Home." "The Grapes of Wrath" was often named the
greatest American film, until it was dethroned by the re-release of "Citizen Kane" in 1958,
and in the recent American Film Institute poll it finished in the top 10. But do many people
watch it anymore? It's not even on DVD.
When the DVD restoration does finally arrive,
viewers will discover a film that uses realistic
black-and-white cinematography to temper its
sentiment and provide a documentary quality to
scenes like the entry into the Okie transient
camp near the California border. Even though
the Joad farm is a studio set, Ford liked to shoot
on location, and records a journey down Route
66 from the Dust Bowl through New Mexico and
Arizona, past shabby gas stations and roadside
diners. The dialogue sometimes grows a little too
preachy to fit within the simple vernacular of
farmers, and Tom Joad's famous farewell to Ma
("Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can
eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there ...") always sounds to
me like writing, not spontaneous expression.
But it is dialogue spoken by Henry Fonda, whose Tom Joad is one of the great American
movie characters, so pure and simple and simply there in the role that he puts it over. Fonda
was an actor with the rare ability to exist on the screen without seeming to reach or try, and
he makes it clear even in his silences how he has been pondering Preacher's conversion from
religion to union politics. We're not surprised when he tells Ma, "Maybe it's like Casy says. A
fella ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs
to everybody." Just as, in the dream of One Big Union, transcendentalism meets Marxism.
The photography is by the great innovators Greg Toland who also shot "The Long Voyage
Home" and after those two Ford pictures and William Wyler's "The Westerner" moved on
directly to his masterpiece, Orson Welles' "Citizen Kane". In "Voyage" he experimented with
the deep-focus photography that would be crucial to "Kane." In "Grapes" he worked with
astonishingly low levels of light; consider the many night scenes and the shots in the deserted
Joad homestead, where Tom and the preacher seem illuminated by a single candle, Tom
silhouetted, Casy side-lit.
The power of Ford (1884-1973) was rooted in strong stories, classical technique and direct
expression. Years of apprenticeship in low-budget silent films, many of them quickies shot
on location, had steeled him against unnecessary set-ups and fancy camera work. There is a
rigorous purity in his visual style that serves the subject well. "The Grapes of Wrath" contains
not a single shot that seems careless or routine.
Fonda and Jane Darwell are the actors everyone remembers, although John Carradine's Casy
is also instrumental. Darwell worked in the movies for 50 years, never more memorably than
here, where she has the final word ("We'll go on forever, Pa. 'Cause ... we're the people!").
The novel of course ends with a famous scene that stunned its readers, as Rose of Sharon,
having lost her baby, offers her milk-filled breast to a starving man in a railroad car.
Hollywood, which stretched itself in allowing Clark Gable to say "damn" a year earlier in
“Gone with the Wind" was not ready for that scene, even by implication, in 1940. Since the
original audiences would have known it was left out, the film ended with safe sentiment
instead of Steinbeck's bold melodramatic masterstroke.
I wonder if American audiences will ever again be able to understand the original impact
of this material, on the page and on the screen. The centenary of Steinbeck's birth is now
being observed with articles sniffing that he was not, after all, all that good, that his Nobel
was undeserved, that he was of his time and has dated. But one would not want "The
Grapes of Wrath" written differently; irony, stylistic experimentation and "modernism"
would weaken it.
The novel and movie do last, I think, because they are
founded in real experience and feeling. My parents were
scarred by the Depression, it was a remembered
devastation I sensed in their very tones of voice, and
"The Grapes of Wrath" shows half a nation with the
economic rug pulled out from under it. The story, which
seems to be about the resiliency and courage of "the
people," is built on a foundation of fear: Fear of losing
jobs, land, self-respect. To those who had felt that fear,
who had gone hungry or been homeless, it would never
become dated. And its sense of injustice, I believe, is still
relevant. The banks and land agents of the 1930s have been replaced by financial pyramids
so huge and so chummy with the government that Enron, for example, had to tractor itself
off its own land.
Roger Ebert Roger Ebert.com
The actors deliver John Steinbeck's words while staring into the hazy middle distance; they
seem to be offering a kind of incantatory spell, too aware of the weight of the text. Henry
Fonda, playing hard- bitten Okie Tom Joad, will be "everywhere, wherever there's a fight." Jane Darwell, an Oscar
winner for her Ma Joad, will "go on forever"; she's "the
people." (This, by the way, is not how to make a subtle
adaptation.)
And still, The Grapes of Wrath works. It builds up a head
of steam in its scenes of migrant-worker violence, and
delivers a terrific lefty roundhouse early on, when humiliated
evictee Muley Graves (Qualen, also the touched convict in His
Girl Friday) reaches down to the earth and seizes it for those
who "died on it."
Like Nixon going to China, the movie required the affiliation of a conservative, director John
Ford, to get off the ground. Even then, some soft-pedaling was done on Nunnally Johnson's
script (including a radically revised ending). No matter: There is resonance here for those who
want it. Mounted only a year after the novel's publication, the film version might have come
too soon. But to have a modern-day Hollywood this strident and nervy! They can't wipe us out.
They can't lick us.
Joshua Rothkopf Time out New York
and for our next presentation…