NFR Project: 'The Grapes of Wrath' (1940)

 

NFR Project: ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

Dir: John Ford

Scr: Nunnally Johnson

Pho: Gregg Toland

Ed: Robert L. Simpson

Premiere: Jan. 24, 1940

129 min.

It’s one of the greatest films of all time. Adapted from John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer-winning 1939 novel, this movie embodies the spirit of it, when it is not amplifying and transcending it. It was the great fortune of the director John Ford, who won the Oscar for Best Director for this film, that he obtained everyone involved in the production; for all were at the top of their game.

It’s an epic saga married to a keenly felt family drama, and is almost Biblical in tone. The Joads, sharecroppers of Oklahoma, are forced to migrate to California when the Great Depression causes them to lose their farm.

Henry Fonda is at his best as the recently paroled Tom Joad, who goes home but finds only the ex-preacher Casy (John Carridine in his definitive, Messianic performance) and Old Muley (John Qualen), who inhabits the abandoned buildings of the area like a ghost.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland, only a year from lensing Citizen Kane, captures many scenes with a single light source, emulating Rembrandt in a bravura display of conveying mood and emotion solely with light. The sinister shadows are palpable, and the faces on screen fight out of them to come into view.

The script is exemplary – every scene is absolutely necessary, and accurately conveys Steinbeck’s “leftist” sentiments. Ford is masterful in his depictions of sorrow and regret. When Ma Joad goes through her box of keepsakes, feeding memories into the fire, Jane Darwell gets a lovely and measured scene that’s simply a recording of behavior . . . as if not nearly acting at all. The deeply felt, strongly conveyed emotions of these stoic people counterbalances the sections of the film that are exposes of capitalism that the film so forthrightly lays out.

Nearly everyone in the film is ripe for exploitation, and there’s not much anybody can do about it. The Joads are in the hell of poverty, reduced to near beggary by an uncaring economy. Tom reunites with his family, and they set out in an overloaded truck to supposed jobs in California.

They quickly find out that the job offer is not what it seems, and hear a heartbreaking tale of woe. They press on, enduring the deaths of both grandparents en route, finally to make it to the green fields of their destination. But even there is exploitation, with owners and managers proposing absurdly low wages for laborers, keeping them on the edge of starvation as they move from harvesting job to harvesting job.

Tom finds Casey again, and helps him stop a trouper from killing an innocent man who is speaking his mind. Casy takes the rap.

Later, Tom finds Casy a third time, and this time Casy is agitating for the union. Lit from above, he looks almost Christlike, glaring down with wide eyes at his interlocutor. The union’s HQ is raided, and a man stoves Casy’s head in with a pickaxe. Tom, in turn, kills him. Tom is wounded on the face, and must be hidden from those in charge, and the law.

The family escapes to a well-run government camp in which migrants are treated kindly and with respect. Tom realizes he has to go, and says goodbye to his mother in the dead of night with one of the greatest monologues on film.

Here the movie deviates from the more melancholy original. Here, the rest of the family moves on together, and Best Supporting Actress Jane Darwell as Ma gets to deliver a gung-ho speech: “Rich fellas come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a'comin'. We're the people that live. They can't wipe us out; they can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.”

This upbeat ending seems tacked to a saga of distress and humiliation. The novel derived from Steinbeck’s notes as a journalist, covering the plight of the migrant work in California. Steinbeck’s humanist values are at the forefront here – he identifies with the least powerful people in the world. And they, he reminds us, are our neighbors.

Every frame is precisely imagined, from extreme close-up to a long shot of a character running away from the camera, receding into ever-shrinking panels of light. Ford renders it as a penitential journey, filled with temptation and despair, a secular Stations of the Cross. In that way, it’s his most Catholic film next to The Fugitive (1947), also with Fonda.

Watching the film is life-changing. It teaches compassion, one of our rarest resources.

The NFR is one writer’s attempt to review all the films listed in the National Film Registry in chronological order. Next time: The Great Dictator.