And we're back with another Oscar Film Journal entry, here at Enuffa.com!
Strap in for a trip to the 1940s, specifically the first year of that decade, for a look at John Ford's acclaimed adaptation of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine, TGOW is the story of a family of Oklahoma sharecroppers who lose their farm to mechanization and are forced to relocate to California to find work. Like the novel, this film is rife with sociopolitical commentary and takes a staunch pro-worker stance, depicting as its antagonists uncaring landowners, brutal deputized police, and a system that chews up and spits out the little guy. Some classics never age.
We begin the story with Tom Joad (Fonda), one of the family's adult sons, who's just been released from prison on parole after accidentally killing a man in a bar fight. He hitchhikes home to find his farmhouse deserted, and a neighbor informs him the wealthy landowners have run everyone off their farms to make way for new, more efficient machinery. Tom finds the rest of his family nearby at his uncle's house, but that house is also set to be bulldozed the next day. The family loads up their dilapidated jalopy and heads west to California, having received a handbill advertising hundreds of available farming jobs. Of course they soon learn that thousands of those handbills were distributed, and jobs in California are now just as scarce as in Oklahoma.
As transient workers the Joads are treated shabbily by local police at nearly every turn, and when they finally reach a privately owned ranch hiring help, the living conditions are still very poor, the ranch general store overcharges for everything, and the pay rates quickly drop below a living wage. Furthermore, the camp guards deal with striking workers violently, getting Tom into more trouble when he fights back. The family opts to move on and soon finds a government-subsidized camp with running water, where the police aren't allowed to enter without a warrant. The facility is so well-run and so peacefully autonomous that local law enforcement enlists a posse to instigate a riot as an excuse to raid the place. Tom is ultimately inspired to break off on his own and become a champion of workers' rights, and the film leaves us on a hopeful note. It's not hard to spot the ways in which these events parallel present day America.
Considering how utterly paranoid this country was about communism in 1940 it's actually kind of shocking how brutally honest this film was allowed to be (As Roger Ebert pointed out in his review, the escalating war in Europe gave the country a reason to instead demonize fascism for a few years, but that didn't last). The Grapes of Wrath has to be one of the most scathing takedowns of unchecked capitalism of its time, and perhaps it helped open some eyes to the country's unsustainable wealth inequality, leading to the great middle class building of the 1950s. Unfortunately that decade also gave us the idiotic Red Scare and the shameful McCarthy fiasco, demonstrating the ever-present, deep-seated insecurity of those at the top.
One of this film's greatest strengths is its magnificent cinematography by the legendary Gregg Toland (who also shot John Ford's The Long Voyage Home that year and would film his masterpiece Citizen Kane in 1941). TGOW looks so unlike Ford's Stagecoach for example, made just one year earlier. Where that film was shot in very traditional, flat 1930s style, this one is bathed in shadows, with unconventional framing, helping convey its bleak tone. There's a second-act scene in a tent where John Carradine tells Henry Fond why he and his friends are on strike, and when he leans forward the bottom half of his face is obscured and only his eyes shine through the gloom. Toland lights numerous scenes this way, adding so much texture and mood to scenes that could've been otherwise flat and routine. I often lament how much gorgeous film photography we were robbed of due to Toland's untimely death in 1948, particularly in the noir genre.
The Grapes of Wrath is one of the more important films of its era, containing themes and commentary that are still 100% relevant during our current flirtation with oligarchy, where millions live below the poverty line despite working full-time, where prices continue to rise just so executives can make their quarterly bonuses, and where AI and computers continue to supplant human beings in so many occupational fields. Working people still have the power to change things, we just need to wield it, and the world needs more stories like this to help inspire and educate.
I give The Grapes of Wrath **** out of ****.
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