This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas are closed and I have to review something.
(PG) ★★★★★
Director: John Ford.
Cast: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin, Dorris Bowdon, Russell Simpson, O. Z. Whitehead, John Qualen, Eddie Quillan, Zeffie Tilbury, Frank Sully, Frank Darien, Darryl Hickman, Shirley Mills.
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| The 1940s version of The Avengers didn't quite have the same razzle dazzle. |
"The Grapes Of Wrath... will in time be forgotten," wrote filmmaker William Bayer in his 1973 book The Great Movies. "This picture is so inferior to the novel, and so dated by its style... and suffers from being so tiresomely predictable, that it is best forgotten."
Bayer was 33 when he wrote this and would go on to have a successful career as an author. Needless to say, The Grapes Of Wrath didn't make his list of great movies. He's now 81, and I can't help but wonder if his opinion on John Ford's film has changed. Because he was wrong - the film deserves to be remembered and revered because, sadly, it's as relevant today as it was in 1940. The Joads of the world are still getting screwed by faceless corporations, endless corruption, and a broken system designed to keep the downtrodden underfoot.
Aside from appearing on this list that I'm working through, The Grapes Of Wrath is one of the few films rated 100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes, and it appears in every update of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die. In 1989, it was among the first 25 films added to America's National Film Registry.
Beautifully filmed, it's a tale of the Great Depression - told while that time was still painfully vivid in people's memory - that's as heartfelt, decent and honest as the folks it's about. Based on John Steinbeck's beloved novel, it follows the Joad family out of America's Dust Bowl to California, only to find that things are just as bad out west. While it differs somewhat from the book, ultimately skewing more hopeful, it's revered as an adaptation because it captures the essence of the book and the people it portrays.
Steinbeck's novel, released in 1939, was a massive success, but due to its bleakness and left-leaning politics few thought it could be turned into a movie, including Steinbeck himself. "I am quite sure no picture company would want this new book whole and it is not for sale any other way," the author wrote to his agent prior to publication. "It pulls no punches at all and may get us all into trouble but if so: so."
Producer Darryl F Zanuck, who secured the screen rights for 20th Century Fox, knew what he was getting himself and his studio into. Despite Steinbeck's own meticulous research for his article series The Harvest Gypsies about the Great Depression, which formed the basis of The Grapes Of Wrath, Zanuck reportedly sent investigators out to Oklahoma to see if the book's claims were true. They returned satisfied Steinbeck was right and that Zanuck could use the old "truth defence" against any arguments the film was pro-socialist or pro-Communist. In a move that surprised some, Zanuck hired conservative director John Ford to helm the project.
"(Zanuck) knew that John Ford was the right man to direct it, with his feeling for the American people and their history," wrote Edward Buscombe for 1001 Movies You Must See.... "(He) identified what was most heartbreaking about the plight of the Joad family - not their acute poverty but the psychological trauma of being uprooted from their home."
Writer/producer Nunnally Johnson (who later wrote The Gunfighter, My Cousin Rachel, and The Dirty Dozen) and Ford turned Steinbeck's book into a digestible story of humanity and hope amid hardship. It switches things around to find a positive message and brighter ending than the book, but it's heartbreaking moments are many, and they still punch hard. Ma (Darwell) burning the belongings she can't take with her to California, a fellow migrant worker recalling the fate of his family, the Joads trying to pay for a loaf of bread and keep their pride in tact, a farmer vowing to fight for his land - the soul still aches for these people 80 years on.
There's also the fact that the issues facing the Joads are the same as those facing millions of Americans today. Eight decades on from Steinbeck's novel and Ford's film, corporations are still screwing workers, banks are still screwing families, and the poor can't afford to live. Watching The Grapes Of Wrath is a reminder that America has been fucked for a long time, and remains fucked for many.
These tear-swelling moments are brought to life by a great cast. Darwell and Fonda really shine as the two nominal stars of the piece - Darwell's Ma is the heart of the film, and Fonda's Tom Joad is the stirring anger that slowly rises and rails against the corrupt and broken capitalist system that has driven the Joads off their land with no safety net and into a world of strikes, scabs and company stores. Fonda renders this all with subtlety and restraint. As critic Roger Ebert put it in his review of the film, "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 (what he's learnt)".
Also worthy of mention are John Qualen (who also pops up memorably in Casablanca and The Searchers) as Muley, and John Carradine as the former preacher Casy. Qualen would recall in the 1975 book Reel Characters that "John Ford... had tears in his eyes when I did that scene in The Grapes of Wrath about my father working the land – the greatest scene I ever had in a picture".
As for Carradine, who would do 11 films with Ford, his preacher is a shining star in the film. A dopey-seeming philosopher, Casy gets many of the movie's deepest lines, despite speaking on few occasions. If Ma is the heart and Tom Joad the anger, then Casy is the film's soul, constantly yearning to do right in a world where right isn't necessarily rewarded.
For a film about the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath is unsurprisingly depressing, but it has unexpected moments of humour, such as Tom Joad's one word taunt "Homicide!" to a freaked-out truck driver, or Granny's phlegmatic response to her first sighting of California, or the Joad's wobbly jalopy. These lighter moments help balance the film, but also speak to the integrity and stoicism of its subjects.
All of it - the highs and lows and in-betweens - are beautifully filmed by Gregg Toland, who did this film, Ford's follow-up The Long Voyage Home, and a little film called Citizen Kane in the space of two years. All three are innovative and groundbreaking in their cinematography. In The Grapes Of Wrath, Toland regularly captures conversations by candlelight, firelight or lanterns, eschewing the common practice of the time of "faking" darkness. He provides on honest eye, reflecting Dorothea Lange's powerful photography that accompanied Steinbeck's The Harvest Gypsies. Toland's single tracking shot through the transient camp brings Lange's and Steinbeck's work to life with all the tragic realism it deserved.
From masked men marching their machines over dusty fields like advancing enemy tanks to heartfelt speeches between a mother and a son, The Grapes Of Wrath has a deep understanding of the bigger issues at play in the Great Depression and the "social intent" of Steinbeck's book. But it also sees the personal amid the political - the Joads are an Every Family from Anywhere, and their story imitates a thousand similar tales that emerged from the Dust Bowl. As critic Barry Norman wrote, the film "is both a savage indictment of capitalist greed and a paean to the common man".
This Great American Film, borne of The Great American Novel, is somehow both proud of Americans and anti-American. As Ma puts it, The Joads of America can't be wiped out, but by god, the American system tries to find new ways to do so. It did in the Great Depression, and it's doing it again now. You only have to watch The Grapes of Wrath again to see it.
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