With this entry in my 100 Essential Films series, I’m now a tenth of the way through the list. (If you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here.) At this rate, I should be finishing the project up sometime around 2039… As Jack Nicholson once said, “So much to do, and so little time.”
Film number ten is a movie about the Great Depression made while it was still very much happening. Although FDR’s New Deal policies had started to turn things around in America, the country had not yet entered World War II in 1940, and the economic precarity of a huge swath of the American people (as I note in the review, the more things change, the more they stay the same) was the main concern of the country.
The novel The Grapes of Wrath is one of my favorite books of all time. I was introduced to it by one of the best teachers I had in high school, Terry Taylor, who taught American History. I’m happy to say that the movie mostly does the book justice. For this screening, I rented Wrath through Amazon Prime. The transfer looks great; Gregg Toland’s beautiful black-and-white cinematography is stunning. He shot the movie a year before his seminal work on Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane.
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The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
dir. John Ford
Rated: N/A
image: Pop Chart Lab
Legendary director John Ford’s classic 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath is as stirring now as it must have been 80 years ago. A lot has changed in those 80 years, but Ford’s picture is also still as relevant as it’s ever been. For proof, all you have to do is look at the brand-new movie Nomadland. That 2020 film – which is a freshly-minted Oscar Best Picture nominee – is about the struggles of the working poor, like The Grapes of Wrath. Instead of peach and grape orchards, the migrant workers in Nomadland move from one Amazon distribution center to the next, but the inhumane living conditions caused by the owner class that both movies center are virtually indistinguishable.
There’s no better example of the streamlined production machine that was Hollywood’s Golden Age than a movie like Wrath. The adaptation hit the screens only nine months after the publication of Steinbeck’s novel. As impressive as that turn-around time is, constrictions of the period – namely the Motion Picture Production Code (a.k.a. the Hays Code) and executive producer Darryl F. Zanuck’s trepidation at potential red-baiting by reactionary politicians – sap the film of some of the source material’s power. Things never get quite as desperate for the Joad family in the movie as they do in the novel. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson’s adaptation opts for a more up-beat ending, too, but anyone who stands in solidarity with labor should find the movie heartfelt and electric.
From the opening minutes of Wrath, director Ford, screenwriter Johnson, and star Henry Fonda collaborate to make the story’s hero, Tom Joad, an angry, cynical man. By the movie’s end, Joad will be transformed into a Christ-figure, taking on the suffering of common people in an attempt to save them from their exploitation at the hands of the elite class.
We meet Joad days after he’s been paroled from prison, where he was serving time for homicide. He’s hitchhiking his way back to his family’s Oklahoma farm homestead. He gets a ride from a trucker, who makes Tom hang on to the driver’s side door while standing on the running board, until they’re out of site of the lunch counter where the trucker met Tom. The trucker’s company doesn’t allow employees to give rides.
Blaming a nameless, faceless company becomes a running theme in the movie. Tom learns it’s “the bank” that is kicking the Joad family – and countless other sharecroppers – off the farmland they’ve worked and lived on for generations. The man who has been hired to organize the bulldozing of the sharecroppers’ homes if they don’t leave insists that he can’t be blamed. He just works for the bank.
The man recruiting workers to pick fruit once the Joads reach California won’t take any responsibility for the starvation wages that the land owner is offering. “I don’t set the price,” he says. He just works for the owner. To paraphrase Tom Joad’s iconic speech near the end of the movie, wherever there’s a rich guy who wants to stick it to the little guy, there’s somebody willing to help him do the dirty work for a little bit of money.
Gregg Toland’s gorgeous black-and-white cinematography and the classical production design – stagy by today’s standards – create a tactile environment in which to document the cross-country trek the Joad family makes from Oklahoma to California. The cavernous soundstage that stands in for Oklahoma prairie as Tom makes his way home from prison has a particularly eerie presence. Tom’s silhouette walking up a hill at sunset as the Dust Bowl winds howl around him is surrealistic. In the first act, the constant sound of the wind blowing, which represents the devastation of the land, is a subtle but effective technique.
It’s during Tom’s trek across the prairie that he encounters the wayward Jim Casy. Presumably because of the Hays Code, the ex-preacher Casy talks around the specifics involving his departure from the ministry. He speaks vaguely of “losing the spirit” and of the young girls who caught his eye. The novel is more explicit, describing Casy laying with the girls, which precipitates his existential crisis. Casy has lost his faith, and despite his moral transgressions, he gains a fire in the belly to help the downtrodden. His own Christ-like ultimate sacrifice, once the Joad clan gets to California, catalyzes Tom’s political awakening.
The performances in The Grapes of Wrath are as naturalistic as any I’ve seen in the movies that I’ve written about for my 100 Essential Films series so far. Henry Fonda is charismatic as Tom Joad; he’s the text book definition of Hollywood Leading Man. John Carradine is haunted as Jim Casy. Jane Darwell’s salt-of-the-earth performance as Ma Joad brings to mind the authentic performances of non-professional actors like Linda May and Charlene Swankie from Nomadland. Darwell’s stirring “We’re the people” speech in the movie’s final minutes gives Wrath its hopeful ending.
It’s been over two decades since I read The Grapes of Wrath for a high school American History class. I don’t remember if the New Deal government migrant workers’ camp that gives the Joads a brief respite is as blatantly propagandistic as it is in the movie. The Joads eventually have to move on from the camp because they need to work. As presented by the movie, this piece of FDR’s plan to combat the Great Depression is the land of milk and honey that Pa Joad assumes California is, before he and the family encounter the same deprivation and elite-class exploitation that they fled in Oklahoma.
It might be propaganda – the idea that the government should provide for people who can’t provide for themselves because of misfortune or mistreatment – but it is propaganda with which I happen to agree. Considering a contemporary movie like Nomadland, the non-fiction book upon which that film was adapted, and other journalism focused on empathy for the poor, the message of The Grapes of Wrath is as salient today as it’s ever been. It deserves it’s place as one of the first 25 films preserved, in 1989, as part of the Library of Congress’s National Film Registry.
after scratch-off
image: Pop Chart Lab
image: Pop Chart Lab