Where else to go in these several “dusty” days for our Film of the Week but the Dust Bowl of Oklahoma? You may remember that in the 1930’s, a combination of dry seasons and depletion of the soil made for terrible dust storms in the American prairies, causing a mass emigration from those states to moister and more promising climes, where people who had worked themselves to the bone all their lives might find gainful work and food and a roof over their heads. But they were often thwarted in their search. It wasn’t just that California didn’t have the wherewithal to take them all in, all at once. It was also that whenever you have a human calamity, there will be some who seek to profit by it. It’s what our director, John Ford, showed also in one of our most brilliant Films of the Week, How Green Was My Valley. The coal mine in a neighboring district has shut down, and that means, says Gwilym Morgan’s son Ianto, that their wages will be decreased, because the unemployed men will agree to work for less. That will not happen, says the patriarch Gwilym. “The owners are not savages,” he says. “They are men just as we are.” But Ianto is proved right, alas.
So the Joad family, led by the stout old Grandma (Jane Darwell, who won an Oscar for her performance) and the determined son Tom (Henry Fonda), make their way west. Along the trail, they come upon a strange man to whom the author of the novel on which our movie is based, John Steinbeck, gave the name Jim Casy, for the virtue of the initials J. C. Jim (the bassoon-voiced John Carradine) is a preacher of the gospel, or at least he used to be. He had in fact baptized Tom. But now he calls for the rights of farm workers to organize and to fight for decent wages and living conditions. His influence upon Tom will be profound, in life and in death. For the peace-loving and justice-preaching Jim Casy will be slain.
Whittaker Chambers, a socialist at that time, didn’t like Steinbeck’s novel, but he admired the film immensely, because Ford focused so relentlessly not upon agriculture and big economics, but upon just a few persons and their human struggle against injustice and suffering. It was, he said, maybe the best film ever made from a so-so novel. I would very much like to know what Chambers thought of The Grapes of Wrath twenty years later, after his break with Communism — I mean what he thought of the film. I am guessing that he admired it still, and for the same reasons, those which transcend politics. For what happened to the Okies, as embodied in the Joads, though not nearly as bloody as what happened to the kulaks under Stalin, was of the same order. But the novel ends with an episode of real grace, as the most selfish person in the family, Rose-of-Sharon, who has just given birth to a stillborn child, nurses an old man on the verge of starvation. That couldn’t be shown in the film, and the shrewd screen writer Nunnally Johnson — you may have seen his work in many films, including one that we’re going to feature someday at Word and Song, The Keys to the Kingdom — deliberately de-emphasized the lesser characters in the Joad family, so that he could end with Tom’s determination to take up the work that Jim had given his life for.
We’re great fans of John Ford at our house. Ford wasn’t a saint, but he prayed hard, maybe even harder than he swore (though he never swore in front of women, and he’d punch you in the teeth if you did that in his presence). The monument in his home town of Portland, Maine, doesn’t talk about his Christian faith, but its words for The Grapes of Wrath are on target. Ford is seated on a director’s chair, a ten-gallon hat on his head, as he evidently looks out on the scene. Roundabout him are stone tributes to each of the seven films for which he won an Oscar. The one for The Grapes of Wrath reads: “This cinema masterwork adapted from John Steinbeck’s novel is the definitive portrayal of the Great Depression in America and the common man’s struggle. Ford’s humane characterization of the Joad family’s flight and trek to California is presented in a documentary style with concern and hope for ‘our people.’ The film earned Ford his second Academy Award.”
Word & Song by Anthony Esolen is an online magazine devoted to reclaiming the good, the beautiful, and the true. We publish six essays each week, on words, classic hymns, poems, films, and popular songs, as well a weekly podcast for paid subscribers, alternately Poetry Aloud or Anthony Esolen Speaks. Paid subscribers also receive audio-enhanced posts and on-demand access to our full archive, and may add comments to our posts and discussions.
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Familiar themes in 2024--- homelessness, migrants, exploitation, attempt at redemption. What is not as commonplace today is the strong family structure-- Birth not abortion, care of the elderly not euthanasia, acceptanve and support during abandonment not divorce, true gender identity not defining one's pronouns. Government to the rescue then and now remains the idealized but false panacea. One looks forward to the renaissance of Christianity.
I love the scene in which Ma Joad is going through a cigar box containing a few trinkets from her meager life and trying to decide what to keep. She comes across a pair of earrings and holds one of them up to her ear while looking into a dusty mirror. The contrast between the piece of frippery and her plain face is too much. She lets her guard down for a moment and becomes a forlorn woman. Then she shakes it off in order to resume her role as masthead of the family--determined to get them "across." The effect could only have been achieved through black and white and the great Gregg Toland.