Reelin' In The Years -- The Grapes of Wrath (1940), directed by John Ford

The Trailer

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The Appropriate Tune: "Dust Bowl Blues", by Woody Guthrie

       Man, quite the eventful couple of months, huh? A lot of bad stuff going on, so bad that something like sitting down to write shitty little movie reviews seemed silly. Wasteful, even. Still I suppose we all need a distraction from time to time, a little levity to break one out of that depressive spiral, even if you have to force yourself a little. Our stop today is 1940; The world has been plunged back into war, it’s biggest yet in fact, and the U.S. has yet to officially throw its hat in the ring, perhaps because they were so flattered that Hitler named one of Germany’s then-biggest trains after it. Nazis were super into that whole Manifest Destiny thing you see, and Jim Crow? Don’t even get them started, they’d probably name their kids Crow if it didn’t remind them of something that wasn’t white. That being said, when it came time to pick the representative for 1940 the competition turned out to be pretty damn fierce. Charlie Chaplin’s antifascist masterpiece The Great Dictator immediately came to mind, but since I had already seen it years ago I ended up going with Modern Times. Hitchcock made his annual appearance with Rebecca, which earned him first Best Director nomination, but it’s still not his time yet. Disney dropped two movies that year, Pinocchio and the audio-visual spectacle Fantasia, but at the time I already had an animated film set up for a later year. The Thief of Baghdad was actually the representative for a while, but because I decided to take a break from genre film in this series it eventually got wiped away in one of the many list revisions. The Proud Valley, starring the great Paul Robeson was also in there for a hot minute, and His Girl Friday might have had a chance if It Happened One Night hadn’t fucked up the romcom for everybody. No, at a time like this, when there are people angry and suffering and miserable, it only makes sense to do a movie about people who are angry and suffering and miserable. Escapism? Never heard of it.

Released in 1940, screenplay by associate producer Nunnally Johnson, The Grapes of Wrath was directed by John Ford, pillar of the Western genre, and of course was based on the novel of the same name by John Steinbeck, oft-considered one of the great American novels. Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, a sharecropper’s son that has finally returned to the family farm in Oklahoma after a stint in jail for homicide (in self-defense), only to find out there isn’t a family farm anymore. The Dust Bowl has run through the Midwest, devastating thousands of acres of farmland, which has led to government-enforced mass evictions of folk from their homes. With the local economy dead in the gutter and little other options, the Joad family (along with the disillusioned ex-preacher Casy) is forced to pack up and head west for California and the promise of work. It’s a long way from Oklahoma to California for just a promise though, and unfortunately the Joad’s are going to learn the hard way that hopes and dreams  don’t often translate to reality.

John Ford is a director that I known of for years, and yet up until watching this film I was reticent about checking out his work, because he was so often connected with those old-school Westerns (which always looked stodgy and uninteresting to me compared to the Italian stuff) and John ‘The Native Americans Deserved to Die’ Wayne. Did not appeal to me whatsoever. Yet for as much criticism as I could give Ford for his reputation as ‘America’s Filmmaker’ I have to give him credit for adapting a story that so thoroughly strips away the illusions of America. The myth of the American Dream? The myth of America being this land of opportunity, of moral uprightness, where good things happen to those who put their noses to the grindstone and work for it. Bunk. The reality is that if you’re poor then you have no opportunities. The reality is that if the people who control the jobs decide to not give you a job, then tough luck, I guess your children get to starve. The reality is if the pittance they give you isn’t enough to live on and you speak up about it, they have no problem bringing in a couple thugs with badges to cave your skull in under the pretense of you being an ‘agitator’. The reality is when you’re poor, when you can’t work or can’t find work, you cease being a human being; You’re an ‘Okie’, a ‘transient’, a ‘migrant’, an eyesore that the ‘normal’ god-fearing public would rather just disappear altogether. Steinbeck’s story is about the endurance of the human spirit in the face of hopelessness, of the righteous fury of the just when faced with injustice, and I think Ford captures those feelings in his adaptation. Pretty damn good for a first impression.

First impressions also tell me that Ford isn’t that adventurous of a filmmaker. There’s not much in the way of cinematography or shot composition, he’s not trying to impress, he’s telling the tale about as straightforward as you can get. That’s not necessarily a good thing, I think he glosses over some scenes that should be treated more dramatically for the sake of pushing the story forward, but at the same time I appreciate Ford’s simple approach. When you’ve got dozens of people, men, women and children, marching in order off to the fields to pick peaches for 7 cents a crate you don’t need much to convey what the audience should be feeling. About the only thing I’ll really dig him for in this regard is a scene near the beginning with Tom and Casy where it’s you can clearly tell it’s a soundstage, like you can hear John Carradine’s voice bouncing off the walls, but you can’t really fault a film for being made in a film studio, especially in the 40s. I do think the scene near the end with Tom and Ma Joad is framed rather well, and you do get some wide open scenery which I understand is a Ford staple, so don’t let it be said Ford is doing rote filmmaking stuff, but it’s definitely not a flashy film. .

The cast is quite good, not as star-laden as is Hollywood’s tendency, but effective all the same. Henry Fonda might be a little too Hollywood to pull off being the son of a destitute farmer, a bit too handsome to be really rugged and I don’t believe he has much of a vocal range, but it does look like he could beat your ass and work a field after so you could do worse for leading. John Carradine is great as the ex-preacher Jim Casy, cast adrift both physically and spiritually, and I wish we got to see more of him. Jane Darwell isn’t just Ma Joad, the emotional pillar upon which the Joad family rests, I think everyone can see a bit of their mom. The rest of the Joad family don’t get quite as much attention, arguably even underdeveloped (Rosie I’d say gets the worst of it) but Ford does devote enough time so that you know who these people are and by the end you’re invested in their pursuit of happiness. Or at least their pursuit of not starving to death.

One thing that I definitely wasn’t a fan of was in regards to the score. While I agree with the use of folksy, jug-band music, the type you’d expect poor Oklahoman sharecroppers to listen to, it’s too upbeat for the movie it’s in. I’d go as far to say that it’s tone-deaf to what Ford is trying to portray on screen. It’s not like folk music is devoid of morose songs, where the hell do you think the blues came from after all, and so one would think that if you’re making a movie dealing with such heavy topics you’d want music that matches the emotional context of the film, rather than something you’d hear in the background of your local hootenanny. Luckily the most powerful moments of the film are done without music at all, but I still don’t agree with the decision.

Also, while Ford captures the essence of the novel in his adaptation, it does feel like a lot of the novel was trimmed down for that adaptation. As I wrote earlier it looks like the movie is building up to something with Rosie, but abruptly ends before it can pay it off. Hell, from watching this movie you’d never know why the story is called The Grapes of Wrath, because I don’t think you ever see a single fruit at all, despite the driving force of the film revolving around it. Unfortunately I haven’t read the novel, but I do know that there are some things there that were not present in the film, for reasons of brevity or because they were risque for the movie audiences of the 40’s. Best to stick with travel montages instead.

The Grapes of Wrath is not a movie without flaws, but it’s still a good movie, with a message that is just as relevant now as it was back then, perhaps even more. Easily, and strongly, recommended. Don’t start packing up your bags yet though, because we’re going to be knee deep in the 1940’s for the time being. Coming up next time, a bonafide bucket list movie that you’ve probably seen referenced dozens of times, but perhaps have never actually seen.