What Do the Faces of the Joad Family Reveal About Them
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The Grapes of Wrath
(American, 1940, 128 minutes, b&westward, 35mm)
Directed past John Ford
Cast:
Henry Fonda . . . . . . . . . . Tom Joad
Jane Darwell . . . . . . . . . . Ma Joad
John Carradaine . . . . . . . . . .Casey
This screening celebrates the centenary of John Steinbeck's nativity in 1902.
It is an unforgettably concise prototype. An eerily flat landscape, windblown, tired, empty. The division between the gray earth and the gray sky is equally precise as it is uninviting. A gaunt homo enters that harsh geometry, surveys it with a look of sad recognition, and so sets off into it. It is the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, and with this paean to the unconquerable spirit of the people of the Dust Bowl, John Ford laid indisputable claim to being the cinematic poet laureate of the common man.
From the moment information technology was published in 1939, The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck's sprawling novel of social consciousness, had simultaneously intrigued and repulsed Hollywood. As a bestseller, it carried great box part potential. But the volume'south powerful economic analysis alienated the movie moguls, virtually of who were extremely conservative.
Steinbeck didn't think the book could exist filmed. Later on one of his trademark marathon writing sessions on July 5, 1938, a day when he wrote 2,200 words, an entire chapter at a single sitting, Steinbeck wrote to his amanuensis: "I am quite certain no picture company would want this new volume whole and it is not for sale any other style. It pulls no punches at all and may get the states all into trouble simply if so -- so."
Darryl F. Zanuck, head of production at Twentieth Century-Fox, was the closest thing to a political liberal the manufacture could offer in its front offices. In The Grapes of Wrath, Zanuck, an exceptionally able "story man," likewise saw a dramatic tale of human backbone, already loaded with expressly cinematic episodes. Zanuck, during his days in a similar position at Warner Brothers before in the decade, had made that studio the domicile of punchy, breathless films virtually the Low, like Wild Boys of the Route and Heroes for Sale. He envisioned The Grapes of Wrath as ii kinds of film at the aforementioned fourth dimension. Start, it would be a certificate about the men and women whom Franklin Roosevelt had called in early 1933 "ill housed, ill-fed, and ill-clothed... the pall of family unit disaster hang[ing] over them twenty-four hours by day." 2d, information technology would exist a drama of fundamentally American optimism, of the triumph of "the little people" over the tyranny of economic science and the toxicant of class prejudice.
Zanuck could look to a stable of directors under contract to Fox who were skilled in the portrayal of Americana. There was Henry Hathaway, who had directed some of the first Technicolor location photography for Trail of the Lonesome Pino, likewise equally other films of American frontier life similar the salmon line-fishing gamble Spawn of the Due north, and was then preparing the epic biographical film Brigham Immature, Frontiersman. In that location was also Henry King, whose 1921 T'olable David is even so considered the finest portrayal of rural life in American movie theatre history. King had presented several visually and narratively slices of American life in films such as In Sometime Chicago, Chad Hanna, and Piffling Erstwhile New York, and had given the previous year's Jesse James an unusual populist twist. And there was John Ford.
Ford went back to the silent days, as well, and a long apprenticeship in the Western. His all-time films, such as 1924's The Iron Horse and 1935's The Informer, had shown both a vivid pictorial sense and a deep sympathy for ordinary men and women. Just it was Ford's highly successful serial of films at Fox with Will Rogers, including Judge Priest (1934) and Steamboat Circular the Bend (1935) that combined these predilections with a specifically American sensibility, and his best films thereafter showed a combination of self-deprecating humor, an awareness of unique American landscapes, and a profound sense of the extraordinary qualities of the ordinary American. With 1939'south Young Mr. Lincoln, Ford showed an nigh mystical understanding of the spiritual sources of American nationhood in a masterwork that deftly identified the personal with the political. Information technology was this certain touch with the American character that Ford would bring to The Grapes of Wrath.
Ford assembled a team of creative people for the film without equal. Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson and leading man Henry Fonda turned in arguably the near memorable work in their long careers. The cadre of character actors who make up the Joad family, their friends, and antagonists, are both picturesque and plausible, their faces a veritable gallery of the many emotions the flick presents; there is John Carradine as Casey, the god-haunted radical preacher, and John Qualen as Mulee, reduced to a scuttling refugee on his own land. But it was cinematographer Gregg Toland who brought the look of drought-killed Oklahoma, and the dangerous Eden of California, to the screen in a mode that continues to make the argument that black-and-white motion-picture show is infinitely more expressive than color. Toland's wide-angle lenses and deep focus shooting make the faces of the beleaguered Joads seem strained and undernourished in shut-up, and give the vast dusty emptiness of Salisaw County, Oklahoma a visual breadth not seen in other films until the appearance of Cinemascope in the l's.
Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson fabricated their nigh significant alter in Steinbeck's concept with the ending of the moving-picture show. For Steinbeck'due south bitter, famously surreal ending, they chose instead a oral communication by Ma Joad, brilliantly incarnated by massive, yet frail Jane Darwell, and a series of images that turn the hard route the Joad family has been traveling into an apologue for a nation cruelly battered past Depression and living nether the long shadow of the European war, but somehow, however "goin' on forever."
The Grapes of Wrath was a happy combination of pop success and an artistic triumph. The most distinguished Left American cultural critic of the catamenia, Otis Ferguson, who was normally exasperated with the Hollywood cinema, wrote that The Grapes of Wrath was "The most mature picture that has always been made, in feeling, in purpose, and in the utilise of the medium." It was an opinion shared past many, including Steinbeck, who wrote "Zanuck has more than kept his word. He has a difficult, straight picture in which the actors are submerged so completely that information technology looks and feels like a documentary film and certainly it has a hard, truthful ring. No punches were pulled -- in fact, with descriptive matter removed, it is a harsher thing than the volume, by far. Information technology seems unbelievable simply information technology is true."
Among the many hereafter filmmakers who would be influenced by The Grapes of Wrath's eloquent visual statement and deep sympathy for humanity was Orson Welles, then just arriving in Hollywod. For his cinematographer on his sublime debut film, Citizen Kane, Welles chose the man who had made The Grapes of Wrath then visually persuasive, Gregg Toland. And decades later, when asked which American directors he had learned the most from, Orson Welles answered with a smile, "The old masters... By which I mean John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford."
— Kevin Hagopian, Penn State University
The following is taken from a review by Frank South. Nugent that appeared in The New York Times, Jan 25, 1940:
In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is ane small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which past dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to exist recalled not but at the terminate of their particular twelvemonth simply whenever great motion pictures are mentioned. To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath"….
Its greatness equally a picture lies in many things, not all of them reducible to words. It is hard, for instance, to discuss John Ford's management, except in pictorial terms. His employment of camera is reportage and editorial and dramatization by turns or all in i. Steinbeck described the Grit Bowl and its farmers, used folio on page to exercise it. Ford's cameras turn off a white-striped highway, follow Tom Joad scuffling through the dust to the empty farmhouse, see through Muley's optics the pain of surrendering the land and the hopelessness of trying to resist the tractors. A swift sequence or two, and all that Steinbeck said has been said and burned indelibly into memory by a director, a camera and a cast.
The post-obit is an extract from the International Dictionary of Films and Filmmakers:
A pet projection of Darryl Zanuck's, The Grapes of Wrath exercised the packaging talents of Fox's studio head for a large office of 1939 equally he put together a squad appropriate to a book with the stature of Steinbeck's novel. John Ford was an obvious choice to straight, Dudley Nichols to write the script, and Henry Fonda to star every bit Tom Joad, the uneducated ex-convict "Oakie" who becomes the personification of flinty Midwestern integrity and moral worth. Knowing Fonda's wish to play Joad, Zanuck lured him into signing an eight-motion-picture show contract by ad his intention to cast in the role either Don Ameche or Tyrone Power….
The film's opening image is of Tom Joad walking with tireless awarding out of the flat Midwestern landscape confronting a counterpoint of leaning phone poles, of society confronted by an ecological and historical disaster against which information technology is helpless to act. Accustomed to such textile from his frontier films, Ford took instinctive and instant control.
Clearly he felt an affinity with the plight of the dispossessed Kansas farmers of Steinbeck's story, which mirrored that of his Irish gaelic forebears turned off the land in the potato famine of the 19th century. And he had already established in films like Four Men and a Prayer the image of the family as not merely unbreakable only an instrument for change, an establishment that could human action to improve social weather condition. Throughout the film, it is the independents similar John Carradine's itinerant preacher Casey and the half-mad fugitive Muley (John Qualen) who seem lost, desperate for companionship, while Jane Darwell and Russell Simpson every bit Ma and Pa Joad exhale a sense of at-home and confidence. As Ma affirms at the end of the film, in a scene added past Zanuck to underline the moral and blunt the harsh dying autumn of the novel, no force can destroy the will of people who are adamant to live….
The Grapes of Wrath abounds with examples of Ford'due south skill in visual language. Poor talkers, the Joads express much in a way of standing, looking, responding to the land through which they pass. Ma Joad'south cleaning up of the old house is shown largely without dialogue, simply her careful turning out of a box of mementoes, the discovery of a pair of earrings and her action of putting them on her ears and looking upwards into the dark at some half-forgotten moment of youthful pleasure could hardly be bettered with words. Jane Darwell is possibly too plump, matriarchal, too Irish for her role, and Ford'south first option, Beulah Bondi, has a greater physical claim to the office with her gaunt, stringy resilience, but so effective is Ford's utilize of the actress that one can no longer imagine anyone else playing it….
Ford's reactionary politics, his populism and republicanism, must take stood in direct contradiction of the volume's harsh message, which may explain his credence of the final carbohydrate-coated scene. Yet in Ford'due south world, to go along faith meant more than whatever political creed; better to believe in an mistake than not to believe at all. When Ma Joad at the finish of The Grapes of Wrath professes the absolute faith of a peasant people in elementary survival, one hears Ford'south vox every bit clearly as that of writer, producer or star.
For boosted information, contact the Writers Institute at 518-442-5620 or online at https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst.
Source: https://www.albany.edu/writers-inst/webpages4/filmnotes/fns02n4.html
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