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The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is director John Ford's most famous
black and white epic drama - the classic adaptation of John
Steinbeck's 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning, widely-read 1939 novel.
[The sentimental film is much more closely related to Ford's
social protest dramas, The Informer (1935) and How Green Was My
Valley (1941) than to his magisterial Westerns.] It was
remarkable that Ford, a staunch and conservative Republican
Party member, made this film - the most popular left-leaning,
socialistic-themed film of pre-World War II Hollywood.
The title of the film was taken from the Battle Hymn of the
Republic, by Julia Ward Howe ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of
the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where
the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful
lightning of His terrible swift sword, His truth is marching
on"). On the screen, the film honestly and realistically
recreates the socio-economic impact of the Great Depression and
a mid-30s drought upon one representative family - the Joads.
Its theme of an oppressed people's epic move to a new home
parallels the Biblical story of Exodus. Their family name, Joad,
also evokes the Biblical character of Job.
Nunnally Johnson's screenplay is remarkably faithful to its
Steinbeck source material. Not present in the novel or the
screenplay is a tacked-on ending in the film that optimistically
and sentimentally affirms the strength and human dignity of the
individual spirit. Numerous other times, Hollywood has
capitalized on other Steinbeck works and adapted them for the
screen: Of Mice and Men (1939), Tortilla Flat (1942), The Moon
is Down (1943), The Pearl (1948), The Red Pony (1949), East of
Eden (1955), and Cannery Row (1982).
There were a total of seven Academy Award nominations for the
film - with two wins: Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell) for
her role as the archetypal mother figure, and Best Director
(John Ford). The other five nominations were Best Picture (that
lost to Hitchcock's Rebecca), Best Actor (Henry Fonda in one of
his greatest film roles), Best Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson),
Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing. In the same year,
when ten Best Pictures were nominated, director Ford had another
entry: The Long Voyage Home (1940). A year earlier, Lewis
Milestone directed another adaptation of a classic John
Steinbeck novel, the tragedy Of Mice and Men (1939), with five
Oscar nominations and no wins.
The plight of the Joad family is universalized as a microcosm of
the thousands of other tenant farmers during the country's time
of crisis, who suffered from oppression imposed by the banks and
big mechanized farm interests. The dispossessed, migrant
family's departure from their windy and dusty land, and their
slow disintegration provides insight into the thousands of
Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas Panhandle, and W. Kansas families who
were evicted and uprooted from their "Dust Bowl" farm land, and
forced to search westward in the inhospitable Eden of California
for jobs and survival with thousands of other migrant workers.
Jane Darwell is marvelous (although her accent is inappropriate)
as the strong center and backbone of the migratory family that
must leave its ancestral land, and Henry Fonda is magnificent as
an unmercifully-harrassed Okie who refuses to be beaten and
crushed by misfortune. The film's themes include the central
importance of the family, the suffering and oppression of the
farmers, the hollowness of the American Dream, the display of
human dignity and spirit in the face of adversity, and issues of
social and economic justice. Original casting for the film
called for Beulah Bondi as Ma Joad, James Stewart as Al, and
Walter Brennan as Pa Joad.
Filmed in journalistic, documentary-style black and white
textures with some low-key lighting and chiaroscuro (often
provided by a candle or low light source) - beautifully captured
by Gregg Toland's expert cinematography (remarkably
un-nominated!), the picture records with astute realism rural
America in the 30s. [One year earlier, Toland had been
cinematographer for Wuthering Heights (1939), and a year later,
he completed the cinematography on Citizen Kane (1941), often
regarded as the best film ever made.] Toland's visual images in
this film resemble the migrant worker photographs taken by still
photographer Dorothea Lange during the Depression. And the
musical score by Alfred Newman used variations of "Red River
Valley" to give the film added flavor.
It is truly ironic that Peter Fonda, the son of the film's main
star, paralleled his father's role in The Grapes of Wrath in his
own starring role in Easy Rider (1969) as Wyatt - another
independent, heroic, wandering nomad across the Southwest US in
a frustrated pursuit of dreams and a better, more idyllic life.
However, in pursuit of the 'American dream,' similar to the Joad
family's quest, he travels from California (the supposed land of
opportunity) to New Orleans - in the opposite direction.
The film begins with an historical prologue:
In the central part of the United States of America lies a
limited area called 'The Dust Bowl,' because of its lack of
rain. Here drought and poverty combined to deprive many farmers
of their land.
This is the story of one farmer's family, driven from their
fields by natural disasters and economic changes beyond anyone's
control and their great journey in search of peace, security,
and another home.
The opening image shows a flat, paved highway road in rural
Oklahoma lined by telephone poles. A small figure walks out of
the distance toward the camera. At a crossroads (a symbol of
America's plight in the late 30s), one of the poles at the left
of the frame leans dramatically askew. Outside the Cross Roads
restaurant, as the jaunty tune "A Tisket, A Tasket" plays on the
soundtrack, the man, wearing a new but ill-fitting suit of
clothes, approaches and asks a truck driver (of an "Oklahoma
City Transport Company" diesel) for a "lift." Their opening
conversation reflects polarized social class differences - the
rich are 'heels' and the poor are 'good guys.'
Figure: How about a lift, Mister?
Driver: Can't you see that sticker? [A decal reads NO RIDERS
ALLOWED - Instructions of Owner]
Figure: Sure, I see it. But a good guy don't pay no attention to
what some heel makes him stick on his truck.
Driver: Well, scrunch down on the running board 'til we get
around the bend.
Laconic Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is hitchhiking on his way home to
his family's sharecropping farm - he is out on early parole
after serving a short prison term for homicide. Becoming
short-tempered, Tom tells the suspicious, nervous truck driver
about his criminal background during their ride:
You know what I'm talkin' about. You've been goin' over me ever
since I got in. Why don't you ask me where I've been?...That big
nose of yours been goin' over me like a sheep in a vegetable
patch. Well, I ain't keepin' it a secret. I been in the
penitentiary. I been there four years. Anything else you wanna
know?...I'm just tryin' to get along without shovin' anybody,
that's all.
To satisfy the driver's curiosity as he leaves the cab of the
truck, a surly Tom shocks and alarms the driver by
characterizing himself as a violent killer:
You're about to bust a gut to know what I done, ain't ya? Well,
I ain't a guy to let ya down. Homicide!
Tom finds a slightly mad, apostate, itinerant ex-preacher named
Jim Casy (John Carradine) sitting under a willow tree by the
side of the road. [Casy functions as an allegorical figure in
the film, conveying the spiritual yearnings of the working class
characters. He also serves as a classic Fordian figure, much
like Mose Harper in Ford's The Searchers (1956).] Tom learns
that Casy was the preacher who baptized him, but now Casy has
"lost the call" and his faith [the preacher used to seduce the
girls in his congregation]:
Tom: Ain't you the preacher?
Casy: Used to be. Not no more. I lost the call. But boy, I sure
used to have it. Oh, I used to get an irrigation ditch so
squirmin' full of repentant sinners I pretty near drowned half
of 'em. Not no more. I lost the spirit. I got nothin' to preach
about no more, that's all. I ain't so sure of things.
Like a religious madman, the gaunt-faced Casy represents
religious principles, but functions as a secular saint. After
Tom offers Casy a drink, the ex-preacher's eyes glow as he
moralizes about his beliefs:
I asked myself, what is this here call(ed) Holy Spirit? Maybe
that's love. Why, I love everybody so much, I'm fit to bust
sometimes. So - maybe there ain't no sin, and there ain't no
virtue. There's just what people does. Some things folks do is
nice, and some ain't so nice. And that's all any man's got a
right to say. 'Course I'll say a grace if somebody sets out the
food, but ma heart ain't in it.
Isolated from events and absent from his sharecropping family
for a few years, things have changed considerably during Tom's
prison term. He explains his past crime and his early parole
from prison after being convicted of self-defense manslaughter
in a drunken, bar-room brawl:
I've been in the penitentiary for four years...I'd do what I'd
done again. Killed a guy in a dance hall. We was drunk - he got
a knife in me and I laid him out with a shovel. Knocked his head
plum to squash...He had a knife in me, that's why they only give
me seven years. I got out in four - paroled.
They leisurely walk together to the Joad family tenant farm.
Along the way, Casy describes Pa Joad's behavior during a
baptizing. To imitate Pa Joad's "run at that bush," the
eccentric preacher howls and jumps a fence:
Last time I seen him was at a baptizin'. He had one of the
biggest doses of the Holy Spirit I ever seen. Got to jumpin'
over bushes, howlin' like a dog-wolf at moon-time. Finally, he
picks hisself out a bush big as a pianah, and he lets out a
squawk and takes a run at that bush.
In the dark, deserted, abandoned, wind-blown Joad cabin [clearly
a studio set], Tom cries out: "Ma!? Pa!? Ma!? Nobody here.
Somethin's happened...They're all gone or dead." Thinking that
his folks are dead because no one is there in the semi-haunted
farmhouse, Tom fears the worst. From the shadows emerges a
crazy, "touched," dispossessed tenant farmer, a former neighbor
named Muley Graves (John Qualen) who became deranged after
surrendering his land.
Tom learns that his own family, two weeks earlier, was forcibly
evicted to the farm of Uncle John, "but they can't stay there
either. Cause John's got his notice to get off." In the spooky
light of a candle, the half-crazed fugitive Muley tells them
about the many "notices" of eviction that have been driving
farmers off their land. He also blames "the dusters" - the
extreme, unending 1930s dust storms, fearful weather conditions,
and the ravages of a merciless drought, for making tenant
farmers penniless:
Tom: What happened? How come they got to get off? We lived here
fifty years, same place.
Muley: Everybody's got to get off. Everybody's leavin', goin'
out to California. Your folks, my folks, everybody's folks.
Everybody except me. I ain't gettin' off.
Tom: Who done it?
Muley: Listen. (Muley gestures toward the howling wind.) That's
some of what done it. The dusters. They start it anyways.
Blowin' like this year after year. Blowin' the land away.
Blowin' the crops away. And blowin' us away now.
Tom: You crazy?
Muley: Some say that I am.
In the first of two flashbacks that emphasize the wide gap
between the rich and poor classes and the failure of the tenant
system, Muley remembers how he, one of the dispossessed, was
driven off the land by the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company. The
coming of mechanized farming, combined with severe weather
conditions, caused landlords to notify homes of possession and
force hundreds of tenant farmer families off their lands. An
agent (Adrian Morris) of the impersonal company, seated in his
automobile, speaks to Muley as he stands and learns with his
family that they must leave their homeland. Unconvincingly,
Muley learns that there's no-one to blame - not even the
bureaucratic companies, banks, and their powerless officers. As
the flashback concludes, the half-mad ("touched"), lost Muley
speaks movingly, eloquently and poignantly about what the land
means to him and his family:
Agent: The fact of the matter, Muley, after what them dusters
done to the land, the tenant system don't work no more. You
don't even break even, much less show a profit. Why, one man and
a tractor can handle twelve or fourteen of these places. You
just pay him a wage and take all the crop.
Muley: Yeah, but uh, we couldn't do on any less than what our
share is now. Why, the children ain't gettin' enough to eat as
it is, and they're so ragged. We'd be ashamed if everybody
else's children wasn't the same way.
Agent: I can't help that. All I know is, I got my orders. They
told me to tell you to get off, and that's what I'm tellin' ya.
Muley: You mean get off of my own land?
Agent: Now don't go to blamin' me! It ain't my fault.
Muley's son (Hollis Jewell): Who's fault is it?
Agent: You know who owns the land. The Shawnee Land and Cattle
Company.
Muley: And who's the Shawnee Land and Cattle Company
Agent: It ain't nobody. It's a company.
Muley's son: They got a President, ain't they? They got somebody
who knows what a shotgun's for, ain't they?
Agent: Oh son, it ain't his fault, because the bank tells him
what to do.
Muley's son: All right, where's the bank?
Agent: Tulsa. What's the use of pickin' on him? He ain't nothin'
but the manager. And he's half-crazy hisself tryin' to keep up
with his orders from the East.
Muley: Then who do we shoot?
Agent: Brother, I don't know. If I did, I'd tell ya. I just
don't know who's to blame.
Muley: I'm right here to tell you, mister, there ain't nobody
gonna push me off my land! My grandpaw took up this land seventy
years ago. My paw was born here. We was all born on it. An' some
of us was killed on it. (Muley squats down and fingers the dust
of the farm he has just lost.) An' some of us died on it. That's
what makes it arn. Bein' born on it and workin' on it and dyin',
dyin' on it. An' not no piece of paper with writin' on it.
With terse, illustrative shots accompanying his tale, Muley
explains his futile resistance when the re-possessing bank moved
in with mechanized, farm machinery and ruthlessly evicted and
forced hundreds of people to evacuate their lands and homes:
They come. They come and pushed me off. They come with the
cats...the cats, the caterpillar tractors. (A series of
dissolving montages illustrate how the land company's tractors
and farm equipment invade the farmland.) And for every one of
'em, there was ten, fifteen families thrown right out of their
homes. A hundred folks and no place to live but on the
road....One right after the other, they got throw'd out. Half
the folks you and me know throw'd right out into the road. The
one that got me come oh, about a month ago.
In a second flashback scene, Muley - with his shotgun - futily
confronts a house-demolishing caterpillar driven by another
sharecropper's son. The tractor driver is a traitorous sell-out
to the rich - he works for "three dollars a day," and
rationalizes contemptuously: "I got two little kids at home, my
wife, my wife's mother. Them folks gotta eat. First and only, I
think about my own folks. What happens to other people is their
own look-out." The driver warns Muley that if he is shot,
another guy would show up in two days to take his place. The
bulldozer moves in and knocks down the dilapidated shack in its
path. The cat's tire tracks in the dust cut across the shadows
cast by the family.
Although his family has already moved west, Muley has stubbornly
vowed to stay (as "an old graveyard ghost") and virtuously
defend his lost land even though he is hopelessly beaten:
What was the use? He was right, and there wasn't a thing in the
world I could do about it....There wasn't nothin' to eat, but I
couldn't leave. Somethin' just wouldn't let me. So now I just
wander around and sleep wherever I am. I used to tell myself
that I was lookin' out for things, so that when the folks come
back everything'd be all right. But I know'd it wasn't true.
There ain't nothin' to look out fer. There ain't nobody ever
comin' back. They're gone! And me, I'm just an old graveyard
ghost. That's all in the world I am.
When Muley hears a night patrol conducted by the agents of the
owners, he teaches Tom and Casy to furtively hide out to avoid
detection. Tom laments how he must hide out on his "own place"
from armed watchmen ("a superintendent with a gun"), agents of
the rich:
Muley: Come on, come on, we gotta hide out.
Tom: Hide out for what? We ain't doin' nothin'.
Muley: Well, you're trespassin', Tom. This ain't your land no
more. And that's a superintendent with a gun. Come on!
Casy: Come on, Tom. You're on parole...(The superintendent
needlessly smashes one of the windows of the deserted cabin with
a rock.)
Tom is exasperated by the plight he finds himself in, after the
patrol car drives off: "Anybody ever tol' me I'd be hidin' out
on my own place...!"
Tiny figures silhouetted against the cloudy horizon the next
day, Tom and Casy continue on to Uncle John's farm where
everyone in the extended Joad family is at breakfast, gathered
to prepare for a trip westward to California. During the meal,
Uncle John (Frank Darien) enthusiastically shows off a handbill
advertising high wages for workers in California to harvest
fruits and vegetables. He is encouraged about the prospects of
work in the vineyards and orchards:
It says, 'Plenty of work in California. Eight hundred pickers
wanted.'
800 PICKERS WANTED
Work in California
Good Wages.
Tents and Cabins Furnished Free.
Store on Camp Ground.
Busy From October to February.
COME AT ONCE!
Bill Macey, Labor Contractor
Grampa (Charley Grapewin) bubbles over, excitedly exclaiming to
Granma (Zeffie Tilbury) about how easy it will be to pick
oranges and grapes in California: "Wait til I get to Californey.
I'm gonna reach up and pick me an orange whenever I want it.
With some grapes. Now there's somethin' I ain't never had enough
of."
In a tender reunion scene, Tom's mother Ma Joad (Jane Darwell)
comes out to greet her son in the yard. She is worried about her
boy's experiences in prison - thinking that he may have been
hardened:
I was so scared we was goin' away without ya and we'd never see
each other again...Did they hurt ya, son? Did they hurt ya and
make ya mean mad?...Sometimes they do somethin' to ya. They hurt
ya and ya get mad and then ya get mean. Then they hurt ya again
and ya get meaner and meaner til you ain't no boy nor man
anymore, just a walkin' chunk of mean mad. Did they hurt ya that
way son?...Why, I don't want no mean son.
Pa Joad (Russell Simpson) and other members of the family greet
Tom, naively sorry to learn that "the jailbird" hasn't broken
out of jail but has only been paroled: "What did ya do son, bust
out?" The contemptible Shawnee Company agent drives up in a
convertible to remind sharecropper Uncle John: "We'll be comin'
through here tomorrow, ya know." The large, extended Joad family
of twelve prepares to leave at daybreak, packing everything into
an old, dilapidated, rickety and lurching truck for a long
journey westward to the 'Promised Land' of California:
Grampa (Charley Grapewin)
Granma (Zeffie Tilbury)
Pa Joad (father of ...)
Ma Joad (mother of ...)
Noah (Frank Sully), eldest son
Tom (Henry Fonda)
Rosasharn (aka Rose of Sharon) (Dorris Bowdon), pregnant
Al (O. Z. Whitehead), teenaged
Winfield (Darryl Hickman), young
Ruthie (Shirley Mills), young
Uncle John (Frank Darien), widowed
Connie Rivers (Eddie Quillan), Rosasharn's new husband
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