John Ford (1940)

John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath is widely regarded as that rare thing, a great film of a great book.  Never having read John Steinbeck’s novel, I can’t comment on one half of the accolade but the screen version does have plenty of strengths.  The principals in this narrative of resilience are the Joad family, Oklahoma tenant farmers who, after losing their livelihood in the Great Depression, travel to California in search of work and a fresh start.  With the help of Nunnally Johnson’s screenplay, Ford tells their story with admirable clarity.  Steinbeck’s title is a phrase in the lyrics of the Battle Hymn of the Republic (‘He [the Lord] is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored’).  In Ford’s hands, the Joads’ odyssey in their dilapidated truck is both realised and mythicised.  The descriptions of communities of migrant workers and of the dispossessed, on the road or in camps, often have the quality of urgent reportage – a quality reinforced by the starkness of Gregg Toland’s black-and-white photography.   At the same time, Toland’s lighting of skies and landscape defines the images in a way that makes us feel we’re experiencing an essential human story, set in a particular place and time.  Ford’s command of the crowd and action sequences interwoven into the drama of the family’s vicissitudes delivers a narrative of remarkable rhythmical variety and flow.

Yet the flow is repeatedly interrupted by a style of acting that, for this viewer, disqualifies the film from greatness.  It’s a style so consistently in evidence that Ford must have encouraged it.  He presents a remarkable collection of faces but it seems that whenever he focuses on a particular one, its owner begins to emote.  This is true of the smallest parts.  The Joads talk with some raggedy kids at one of the migrant camps; each of the kids, at the approach of the camera, starts accentuating misery.  At a petrol station, where the Joads can afford only a single gallon of petrol, the affable pump attendant signals emphatic disappointment:  he’s suddenly woeful, his shoulders slump.  Almost the entire cast seems to have been instructed to decide the primary emotion their character is feeling at any particular time and play it to the hilt.  This is all the more apparent in the larger roles, where moods change and there are plenty of lines to be spoken.  The delivery of these means that characters tend not to talk but to speechify.  The itinerant ex-preacher played by John Carradine is a conspicuous example.

It’s of great benefit to the film that Henry Fonda, as the hero Tom Joad, is an exception to this.  At the start, Tom, just released from prison, hitches a lift back to his parents’ home and reacts touchily to what he takes to be prying on the part of the truck driver giving him a lift:  Fonda snarls a bit too relentlessly.  What follows, though, is increasingly impressive – and expressive.   To a degree unusual for a Hollywood star of his generation, Fonda transmits personality through physicality – and through his whole body.  He thus animates Tom Joad’s impulsive nature more fully than could be achieved by facial and vocal means only.  He also relates vitally to Ford’s geography.  In Oklahoma, Tom is a creature of the place where he was born and raised in an extraordinarily real way.  Because nothing in Fonda’s acting comes over as predetermined, Tom in California is, for good or ill, discovering a new land.

The Joads seem to have turned the corner when they reach a government-run camp that offers basic work, decent washing facilities and regular social events.  On arrival there, Tom has an interview with the caretaker of the camp (Grant Mitchell, in one of the few subtle performances in lesser roles).  As he goes to the door of the caretaker’s office, Tom says, ‘Ma’s shore [sic] gonna like it here – she ain’t been treated decent for a long time’.  Fonda’s delivery is beautifully understated.  It anticipates the fine job that he makes of Tom’s big speech as he prepares to leave the camp and his family for good.  Henry Fonda’s wordless walk away from the camera and his mother (Jane Darwell) is the film’s most moving moment.

Jane Darwell won the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress for her portrait of the indomitable Ma Joad (and Ford the second of his four Best Director Oscars for this film).  Darwell is an unarguably strong presence.  Her considerable weight confirms Ma as the family’s anchor.  She’s emotionally more sophisticated than everyone except Fonda.   Even so, you learn to get apprehensive whenever Ma Joad gazes into the middle distance (and Jane Darwell registers the proximity of the camera) to impart gallant thoughts.  As she, her husband (Russell Simpson) and what remains of their family finally go back on the road, Ma delivers The Grapes of Wrath’s closing speech:

‘Rich fellas come up an’ they die, an’ their kids ain’t no good, an’ they die out. But we keep a-comin’.  We’re the people that live. Can’t nobody wipe us out.  Can’t nobody lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa.  We’re the people.’

According to the directions in the screenplay, Ma Joad ‘says this with a simple, unaffected conviction’.  Jane Darwell delivers the paean to common folks with a lot of skill;  whether that results in simple, unaffected conviction is harder to say.  The closing credits are accompanied by a final burst of Alfred Newman’s music – a series of variations on the traditional song ‘Red River Valley’.  We hear it often enough to last several lifetimes but there’s no denying it’s an integral and affecting part of this potent film.

19 May 2019