The Grapes of Wrath

            Tonight’s John Ford movie is The Grapes of Wrath, released in 1940 and not only the most famous of Ford’s films, but one of the most celebrated of all Hollywood movies. It tells the story of a family of dirt-farming sharecroppers from Oklahoma during the Depression, pushed off their land by the drought and the banks, and migrating to California to try to find work. John Steinbeck had published the novel just the year before, and it was a bestseller. The movie version went on to be a big success, both critically and at the box office, and to win Ford one of his four Oscars for Best Direction. But this is one case where the personal stamp of a strong filmmaker is not as important a factor as others in determining the character of the resulting film. Ford’s stamp is there, all right. But even stronger is the stamp of Steinbeck’s novel and Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay—and above all the story’s extremely vivid and even inflammatory treatment of its social problem.

            The story here is a story of people oppressed and ground down under social pressures that are not supposed to exist in America. The Depression had thrown millions out of work and put a severe strain on the whole financial structure of the country. But it was in the rural areas, where parched earth and dust-storms caused nature itself to fail and drove people off the land, that Depression hardships met hand-in-hand with populist ideology. The Joad family has lived on their land for generations, and it’s taken the economic and agricultural upheaval of the 1930s to demonstrate that, as sharecroppers renting their land, they have no more right to it than city-dwellers do to their apartments if they can’t pay the rent. The whole gruelling story is then built up on the basis of this principle of ownership, sacred to a capitalist society but now creating terrible problems. When the half-crazed, dispossessed farmer Muley says that what creates ownership of the land is living and dying on it, that’s a viewpoint every viewer will agree with emotionally—but it’s also an idea that runs directly counter to principles of purchase and fiscal ownership.

            Later on, as the family treks along Highway 66 through Arizona and into California, they run into lots of other things that aren’t supposed to exist in America. So we see the prejudice of gas-pump jockeys, the militant suspicion of state inspectors, and the hostility of local residents to the desperately poor and hungry back-country migrants coming into areas that have their own troubles coping with the Depression. Even more disturbingly, we also see the brutally exploitative policies of employers and their hand-in-glove relationships with local police agencies who are quite happy to act as their enforcers, and the whole climate of violence that surrounds people in desperate need. Even though the film version softens the fate of the family and goes for a measure of uplift at the end, there’s still plenty of food for thought in The Grapes of Wrath, and almost all of that thought is about how the economic and social structures of America are far from being fair and equable.

            For the most part, the movie is a superlative piece of work. Ford’s contribution is to emphasize family structure and the ideal order of a miniature society underlying it, and to bring vividly to life the individual characters of the story. The Joads are made up essentially of three generations: the crusty grandparents, the already-grizzled parents who are now past fifty, and the children who range in age from pre-teenagers to grown men and women. The central character is Tom, the eldest child, played one can only say tremendously by Henry Fonda. What’s so impressive about this character and this performance is not the moral fervour and sense of integrity—you expect that from Fonda, it’s one of his most indelible qualities, nobody was ever better at it than him. No—it’s this quality in combination with a set of other qualities you don’t expect to find in Henry Fonda: toughness, anger, steely hardness, even murderous violence. In the memorable opening scenes of the movie he’s just getting back to the farm from a four-year prison sentence for homicide—he killed a guy in a bar fight and is out on parole. His discovery that his family has been kicked off “its own land,” and his subsequent run-ins with officials, hired thugs and corrupt cops, don’t do anything to improve his disposition. In fact one way of describing the action of the film is as a growth in Tom’s understanding of the forces that are oppressing him—he goes from being a hard-case poor sharecropper to being someone with a dawning political understanding.

            Surrounding this rock-solid central figure are a host of others. Jane Darwell as the indomitable mother won an Oscar here, but that award could have gone to so many others—to John Carradine’s strange and luminous ex-preacher, for example, or to Charley Grapewin’s querulous Grandpa, or to John Qualen’s febrile, emotionally-broken Muley.

            Another star of the show is the great cinematographer Gregg Toland, who endows shot after shot with wonderfully poetic composition and treatment of light, and who after this would go on to revolutionize movie photography with his work on Citizen Kane. Building on Steinbeck’s novel, Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay has far less speechifying, and far more simple weatherbeaten plain-speaking, than you’d expect in such a socially-conscious project. And of course one can’t forget Ford, whose understated lyrical setups and terrific direction of actors give the movie eloquence and depth. The first shot of the movie, a combined triumph of Ford and Toland, tells you what to expect here. Altogether, this is one of the great Hollywood movies, just as its reputation would suggest.

                                    [screen movie]

            There are a lot of astonishing things about The Grapes of Wrath, but to my mind the most astonishing of all is that it got made in this fashion at all. Critics from the left have complained over the years that Steinbeck’s novel was sanitized in the movie. For example, the dismal, prison-like Peach-Farm camp originally came after the idyllic government camp—and simply flip-flopping the two converted a downward spiral into a progression towards hope and possible solutions. At the end of the book the Joads are living destitutely in a barn, picking cotton for starvation wages. Rosasharn’s baby—who at a certain point just disappears from the movie—is born dead in the novel, and Rosasharn uses her milk to breastfeed a starving old man instead. In the movie Tom has been driven into hiding and the family broken up, but these disasters are to some extent covered by Tom’s farewell speech to his mother, where he says he’ll be everywhere men are struggling for freedom, and by Ma’s own final “we are the people” speech. Again, these changes are all made to provide some uplift at the end of the movie, to avoid presenting simply a picture of abject defeat and the crushing of human beings.

            But Steinbeck approved the final script, and the movie still packs a punch that’s amazing even today. As I was suggesting before the film, the very basis of property rights comes under attack in this movie. The banks own the land, but they don’t work it, they just take the profits of other people’s work—and if the profits aren’t big enough, they take the land away. The landowners in California do work their land, or at least they’re directly involved in farming it, but for the most part their behaviour is equally predatory. The elucidations of how they drive wages down, and enlist the police or hired tough-guys to enforce their oppressive behaviour, is a pretty ringing denunciation of business practices. The idea that the law, and especially the police, are basically tools of owners and rich guys, is shown in a dozen different forms in the movie. Likewise as soon as you see somebody in a big car, you know he’s going to do something ugly.

            Any simple solutions to the problem are deflated in the speech of the man from the sheriff’s office in the first part of the film: you can’t shoot him, he’s just doing his job; you can’t shoot the district bank supervisor, he’s just taking orders; you can’t shoot anybody. The problem isn’t a problem of good guys and bad guys; it’s a systemic problem. In fact there is one good guy, so to speak, in the film. It’s the government agency that sets up the dream-camp the Joads finally discover, the camp that gives them decent living conditions and self-government, and defends them from the aggression of local business people and their tame police. Of course this is Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal government—and Grant Mitchell, as the camp guardian with rimless spectacles and hearty reassuring manner, almost looks like a little Roosevelt.

            But wait a minute. Aren’t these notions of resistance to market-based economic forces, and power to the people who do the work, and government regulation and guarantees of minimum acceptable living conditions—isn’t all this, um, communism? Or at least serious socialism? You bet it is. The structure of self-rule in the government camp, with its committees and representatives, is actually an exact replica of a Russian soviet. The idea of the law as an instrument of oppression, to be used by the powerful when it suits them and ignored when it suits them, and the idea that you can’t simply fix the local bad guys because the whole system is the problem, is actually revolutionary. Its revolutionariness is disguised by the down-home American nature of everything in the movie, by the fact that rural culture has always had a deeply conservative aspect, and by the fact that nobody has even remotely heard of Karl Marx. One of the nicest moments in the movie is Henry Fonda asking, “Who is these reds, anyways?” Of course at the end of the movie he’s going off to be a labour agitator.

            All of this is simply amazing. How could this stuff have gotten into a Hollywood movie? The producer Daryl Zanuck, who was more responsible than anyone for bringing it to the screen, was a lifelong Republican. Ford always had a very strong conservative streak. But both of them were populists, and that rurally-based ideology could be very radical without any influence of city-based socialist ideas. And rural populism can be right-oriented or left-oriented or even both at the same time—just look at the respective politics of Alberta and Saskatchewan. In the 1930s, of course, this kind of radical politics was in the air, and the Depression had caused a very widespread rethinking of mainstream conservative political traditions. But even in 1940 there was a hue and cry from the right when The Grapes of Wrath was released, and calls for a boycott from some business interests.

            My point, though, is that in the 1980s or 1990s such a movie would never get made at all—or if it did it would be as some fringe independent production, not as a major studio release. We should be so lucky as to get a film like this nowadays.