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GRAPES OF WRATH
1940
DIRECTED BY JOHN FORD
11:00 AM WARNER GRAND THEATER
(128 minutes.) Producer:
Daryl F. Zanuck. Writer: Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by John
Steinbeck. Director: John Ford. Cinematographer: Gregg Toland. Editor:
Robert L. Simpson. Music: Alfred Newman. Starring: Henry Fonda, Jane
Darwell, Russell Simpson, John Carradine, Ward Bond, Darryl Hickman.
A confluence of wonderful talents are responsible for this beauty, from
1940. John Steinbeck’s great novel -- the fruit of long research,
traveling and living among the countless migrant workers uprooted by
the Great Depression -- was distilled into a screenplay of luminous
compactness by Nunnally Johnson. John Ford,who directed, is generally
given the lion’s share of the credit for this film’s tremendous power,
but speaking as one who once studied a studio-bound copy of Johnson’s
script for a class (at the insistence of film director Alexander
Mackendrick, who was out to break my fellow film students and I from
the cult of the auteur), Ford followed Johnson’s careful
structurings and instructions to the letter. Gregg Toland’s exceptional
cinematography is another blessing. With Ford’s encouragement, Toland
studied the photographs of Dorothea Lange, which so expressively
documented the rural poverty of the Great Depression. He recreates
Lange’s silvery, exacting, yet compassionate eye, here. John Ford’s
particular genius is everywhere evident in his fluid, sensitive
staging, and above all his knack for unlocking actors, which fills this
drama with breathing souls.
Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is a
man fresh out of prison who discovers that years of intervening drought
and economic hardship have driven his family off their land, along with
most of their neighbors. As the Joads head west with Tom in tow, they
endure any number of hardships, like a family out of scripture -- brute
hunger, the cruelty of strangers -- a meandering journey across the
wilderness that divides the Oklahoma dust-bowl from the land of milk
and honey they hope California to be. There are wonderful scenes of
family warmth anchored by the earthy, indestructible Ma (Jane Darwell,
who won an Oscar). When he saw the first cut, producer Daryl Zanuck
ordered Johnson to compose a final, upbeat speech for Ma about how
we’re-the-people and a woman is like a river. Ford, who left the
directing of that tacked-on scene to Zanuck, preferred to shape his
vision of the story around Tom, culminatng in his oddly natural,
unpretentious transformation into a Christ-like hero. Fonda holds the
screen alone for several long minutes as this comes to pass, speaking
quietly, inside himself, in a closeup so mighty that it’s no wonder
Ingmar Bergman called Ford his favorite director.
Here’s a eulogy spoken by Casey, the ragged former preacher, played by
John Carradine, over an anonymous dead man: “This here old man just
lived a life, and just died out of it. I don’t know whether it was good
or bad, an’ it don’t matter much. Heard a fella say a poem once. An’ he
says, ‘All that lives is holy.’ But I wouldn’t pray for just an old man
that’s dead. ‘Cause he’s alright. If I was to pray, I’d pray for folks
that’s alive, an’ don’t know which way to turn. Granpa here, he ain’t
got no more trouble like that. He’s got his job all cut out for him.
So, cover him up an’ let him get to it.”
