The Grapes of Wrath (20th Century-Fox, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Thursday, June 5) I caught up with a film on Turner Classic Movies that had somehow eluded me before: The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford’s 1940 film of John Steinbeck’s classic novel about the Oklahoma dust bowl and the flight of the farmers who were victimized by it. (Actually only about one-fifth of the Oklahoma farmers actually left the state, but the initial popularity and long-term success of Steinbeck’s novel has created the impression that virtually all of them did.) I remember reading The Grapes of Wrath some years ago and being struck by how it was a religious allegory as much as it was a political one: one of the leading characters is a woman named “Rose of Sharon” (though that’s usually abbreviated to “Rosasharn”) and it became clear early on, as Steinbeck burdened his leads with one misfortune after another, that the reason he’d called the central characters “Joad” is it sounded like “Job.” Joseph McBride once cited the film The Grapes of Wrath as an example of “Ford’s conservative treatment of liberal material” (as opposed to Don Siegel’s Dirty Harry’s “liberal treatment of conservative material”), though the TCM screening was co-hosted by John Ford’s grandson, Dan Ford, who said Ford had been a New Deal Democrat when he made The Grapes of Wrath and, like Ronald Reagan, moved Right later. (He was enough of a libertarian to have spoken out against the Hollywood blacklist, albeit only privately at a meeting of the Screen Directors’ Guild.)

The Grapes of Wrath is a problematic film (though my husband Charles, who watched it with me, said he liked it this time around better than he had before), mainly because Ford and his screenwriter, Nunnally Johnson, tried to shoehorn it into typical Hollywood conventions when the story virtually demanded a rough-hewn, semi-documentary approach. When the film opened I got more and more irritated by the fact that the opening sequence – Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns home from a four-year prison stretch in Macalester, Oklahoma to find his own and every other family in the neighborhood dispossessed by a land company that has taken over their farms and forced them off – was clearly shot on a soundstage “exterior” with a painted backdrop. It’s not until the Joads finally start their migration to California – lured there by a leaflet advertising 8,000 jobs for farmworkers (the jobs exist, all right, but the contracting companies that put out the leaflets printed hundreds of thousands of them, and the actual wages for the handful of people who actually get hired turned out to be much lower than promised) – in their preposterously overloaded truck that practically becomes a character in its own right that the film finally moves genuinely outdoors. Through much of the film I was reminded of Dwight Macdonald’s comment on another highly problematic film about poor people, Luchino Visconti’s La Terra Trema (1948), in which Macdonald quoted another critic who’d seen the film with him at a festival: “You come away thinking, not ‘How terrible!’ but ‘How artistic!’ He’s more interested in showing you what a great director he is than in making you feel their poverty.”

That’s precisely my problem with John Ford’s work here: though he won his second Academy Award for Best Director for this film (beating out, among others, Alfred Hitchcock for that year’s Best Picture winner, Rebecca), his direction here has a staid, stiff quality. Ford had the great Gregg Toland as his cinematographer, and Toland not surprisingly shot almost the whole film through red filters, but all too many of the scenes are long dialogue exchanges that don’t even do shot-reverse shot cutting and through much of the film I got the impression that I was being lectured about rural poverty rather than actually shown the evils of rampant capitalism. The Grapes of Wrath (the movie) is about as good as could have been expected from Hollywood in 1940, and one aspect of the film that scores near-perfectly is the casting of Henry Fonda as Tom Joad. He made this film right after having played Abraham Lincoln in Ford’s Young Mr. Lincoln – and Lincoln is arguably the second most challenging character for a male actor (after Jesus Christ) – and in order to get the part he had to sign a long-term contract with Darryl F. Zanuck at 20th Century-Fox, which he deeply resented. (Among other things, it means he had to do silly movies like the “hokum” comedy The Magnificent Dope in 1942, in which he played the central character in a role that practically defined “overqualified.”) I’ve read that Fonda and Tyrone Power were bitterly jealous of each other when they were both Fox contractees in the later 1930’s and early 1940’s; Fonda was jealous of Power because he got the parts in the big-budget blockbusters that kept the studio in business, and Power was jealous of Fonda because he got the leading parts in the serious “prestige” films like The Grapes of Wrath.

But the rest of the casting is problematic because Ford pressed into service too many of the “Ford Stock Company” actors whether or not they were right for the parts: Jane Darwell as Tom’s mother is superb (she even redeems the highly sentimentalized ending screenwriter Johnson supplied), but Charley Grapewin as Tom’s grandfather is just annoying, as if Uncle Henry from The Wizard of Oz somehow wandered into Steinbeck’s world. I’ve long regarded John Carradine as one of the most underrated actors of all time, and he’d given great supporting performances for Ford in The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), one of the director’s unsung masterpieces, and in Stagecoach (1939). But trying to make sense of Preacher Casey (spelled “Casy” here even though that’s not the spelling I remember from the book) eludes him, and through all too many of his scenes he comes off like the retard he’d play in one of his worst films, the Bela Lugosi vehicle Voodoo Man, for Monogram five years later. John Qualen makes a powerful impression as Muley, the character who explains the dust bowl disaster and the mass dispossession of the Oklahoma farmers to Tom, but Eddie Quillan is pretty much a blank as Connie, the man (a man named Connie?) who marries, impregnates and then abandons Rosasharn Joad (Dorris Bowdon), Tom’s sister – though Bowdon is quite good in an underwritten role.

The best moments in The Grapes of Wrath are good almost in spite of John Ford, Nunnally Johnson and Gregg Toland, especially the long sequence in which the Joads finally find work picking peaches on the Keene Ranch only to find they’ve been hired as strikebreakers, and once the strike is broken their pay will be slashed from five cents per bucket to 2 ½ cents. The ranch is being run as a virtual prison camp, with armed guards patrolling the premises and threatening to shoot on sight anyone who goes outside for any reason whatsoever – as we learn when Tom Joad tries to leave the family’s cabin for a nighttime walk. There’s also the scene in which the politically naïve Tom asks why whenever anyone tries to stand up for themselves they’re denounced as a “Red,” a term he’s literally never heard before in this context, and the final deliverance when the Joads arrive at the government-sponsored camp (it’s a galvanic shock to a modern audience that the federal government’s representatives are actually portrayed as the good guys in this movie!). That happened about two-thirds of the way through the book but Johnson remodeled the story to make it, and the attempt by grower-hired vigilantes to break up the camp and give the police an excuse to destroy it and arrest its organizers, the climax of the film. The Grapes of Wrath the movie is an estimable film, probably the best Hollywood could have done with this story given the standard movie conventions of the time. But quite frankly I think Ford’s lesser-known films are generally better – particularly Pilgrimage (1933), The Prisoner of Shark Island (1936), which despite its horror-style title is actually a true story of Dr. Samuel Mudd and how he was framed and convicted for having been part of a conspiracy to assassinate Lincoln – and the awesome late-silent Western Three Bad Men (1926), a remarkable anticipation of the so-called “psychological Westerns” that would become all the rage a quarter-century later.