****/**** Image A Sound A- Extras A+
starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Charley Grapewin
screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, based on the book by John Steinbeck
directed by John Ford
by Bill Chambers John Steinbeck wrote a, if not the, great American novel with The Grapes of Wrath, but John Ford's emotionally devastating film version, I say without a trace of anti-intellectualism, supplants Steinbeck's prose in memory. In the hands of Ford and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson (peaking early), Steinbeck's Dust Bowl evokes Nazi Germany played out on American soil. Though this was a metaphor nascent in Steinbeck's Pulitzer prize-winning book (whose publication preceded the film's release by approximately one year), with The Grapes of Wrath landing in theatres a month after Germany's deportation of Jews into occupied Poland, with those gaunt faces registering far less innocuously than Steinbeck's descriptions of them, it became a full-fledged allegory in its transition to the big screen. (That Ford was initially drawn to the project because it recalled ancestral tales of the Irish potato famine points to themes that camouflage with each new epoch. Is Steinbeck the last mythmaker?) Johnson may streamline Steinbeck to a degree that softens his guarded optimism, but his script is of tonal fidelity; Ford, revolutionizing talkies by revisiting the techniques of silent-era Expressionism with world-class cinematographer Gregg Toland, gives the picture the glaze of a thriller, as though recognizing a new urgency in old rhymes.
Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is released from prison and returns home to find a town spookily deserted. Turns out the bulldozers arrived one day like a cavalcade of tanks to drive Oklahomans from their farms and make way for mechanized agriculture–sometimes pitting neighbour against neighbour, as illustrated by a provocative, harrowing flashback in which a sell-out landowner is shown steering the instrument of destruction with newfound contempt for the proles. Eventually, Tom and an ex-preacher, Jim Casy (John Carradine, whose character's initials were somewhat belaboured for their emblematical value in the text), locate the Joads, who are preparing to make a pilgrimage in a cramped jalopy at the urging of a flyer assuring wealth and prosperity await them in sunny California. Tragedy strikes the family on the road, more than once, but they persevere, only to arrive at their destination and discover that labour camps, most of them thriving in squalor and preying on insolvent scabs, have sprouted up like dandelions in a country ravaged by The Man.
Fonda appears young for the last time here, although it's still impossible to imagine him in any kind of natal state. Wizened by an upcoming Navy stint in the second World War, five failed marriages, and the social burden of embodying what David Thomson called "Hollywood's Statue of Liberty," Fonda nevertheless always seemed an old soul, one shocked into deterioration when confronted with the prophet's responsibility of starring in The Grapes of Wrath. Tom Joad wasn't a part, it was destiny, and we sense that Fonda senses it. In fact, he signed a seven-picture contract for the chance to be in this one. Tom's departure is the most powerful in all of Ford (I actually can't say that with authority, but it must be), heralded as it is by a monologue that transformed him into a beacon of hope undimmed by the house lights. Yet this is the anomalous film from the Golden Age–let alone from Ford–with a protracted denouement, which some people remember better than Tom's devastating goodbye. Offers Ma Joad (richly-deserved Academy Award winner Jane Darwell):
For a while, it looked as though we was beat…Looked like we didn't have nobody in the whole wide world but enemies. Like we was lost and nobody cared. 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. They can't wipe us out. They can't lick us. We'll go on forever, Pa, 'cause we're the people.
Distinguished from her co-stars by a perhaps incongruously generous frame, Darwell's casting gains resonance as Ford transforms Ma Joad into a fertility idol of sorts–the physical correlative, if not manifestation, of Tom's pregnant wish for greener pastures, proverbial and literal. With her parting words, she trains a vital ray of hope on a pre-emptive and perpetual elegy. Calling sentiment Ford's "vice," Orson Welles complained to Peter Bogdanovich that "he made that into a story about a mother's love." But, of course, he plucked Toland to shoot Citizen Kane on the basis of his work here, a tacit acknowledgment of the film's effect on him. To paraphrase an oft-quoted Welles remark on a different tearjerker, The Grapes of Wrath could make a stone cry.
THE DVD
In preparing a DVD release of The Grapes of Wrath, Fox overcame the significant hurdle of a nonexistent negative with utter aplomb. The fullscreen transfer, derived from a digitally restored nitrate dupe, looks exquisite throughout, although blacks are chalkily inconsistent in the dark first act. Grain is fine–never intrusive–and the level of detail generally wows, while the restored audio, presented in either its original mono configuration or a stereo upgrade, is robust enough to encourage a participatory hum-along during the many reprises of "Red River Valley." Side A of the flipper platter hosts two versions of the film, one of which restores (via seamless branching) the "UK Prologue," a written passage that trails Ford's director credit with a "once upon a time" explanation of the Dust Bowl for the sake of international viewers. Interestingly, many British critics took Ford and especially Johnson to task for downplaying America's liability in its own Depression with this preface, but it remained unseen in the U.S. until recently.
Also joining The Grapes of Wrath is a feature-length commentary courtesy of Ford historian Joseph McBride and Steinbeck historian Susan Shillinglaw that ranks as the best for a Studio Classics title to date. Dense with historical and biographical details, the track documents parallel lives that are occasional mirror images: both Steinbeck and Ford, for example, were subject to unceremonious FBI investigations for openly sympathizing with the poor. Cleared up is a persistent rumour that Steinbeck was displeased with the finished film (he was, in fact, pleasantly surprised by it), though neither commentator demurs from taking a critical view of its sentimental slant.
Turn the disc over to find the 45-minute "Biography: Darryl F. Zanuck, 20th Century Film Legend". As with the majority of the A&E program's instalments, hagiography is more like it, but the piece sports precious outtakes (such as Tyrone Power scratching the initials "DZ" into upholstery as The Mark of Zorro's Zorro) and contributions from a diverse crop of interviewees, the late, great Roddy McDowall, star of Ford's How Green Was My Valley, among them. A restoration comparison leads with preamble that diminishes the amount of effort exerted in repairing The Grapes of Wrath because we don't have any context for it: That it took a whole 26 hours to refurbish the film in the HD realm just doesn't sound terribly impressive. Finally, a set of directly and indirectly relevant Movietone newsreels (from 1934, "Worst Drought in Many Years Hits Middle West;" 1934: "Drought Distress is Increasing in the Mid-West;" 1934: "Mid-West Drought Distress Becomes National Disaster;" 1934: "Outtakes" (unused footage of the starving class); and 1941: "Roosevelt Lauds Motion Pictures at Academy Fete"), a gallery of noir-ish stills for The Grapes of Wrath, and trailers for The Grapes of Wrath, All About Eve, An Affair to Remember, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and My Darling Clementine round out this indispensable DVD.
129 minutes; NR; 1.33:1; English DD 2.0 (Stereo), English DD 2.0 (Mono), Spanish DD 2.0 (Mono); English and Spanish subtitles; DVD-14; Region One; Fox
