The Grapes of Wrath

             (American realist novel was written by John Steinbeck and published in 1939) 

"The Grapes of Wrath" is a left-wing a 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 theatre feeling more pity than anger or resolve. It's a message movie, but not a recruiting poster.

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.

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 actor's everyone remember, 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.