John Ford‘s “The Grapes of Wrath” is a left-wing
parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper’s
son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer. The message is
boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such
beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity than anger or
resolve. It’s a message movie, but not a recruiting poster.
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 simplytherein 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 innovator Gregg 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.
