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“Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord. He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored; He hath loos’d the fateful lightning of His dreadful swift sword, His truth is marching on.” - Battle Hymn of the Republic.
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In 1936, John Steinbeck wrote a series of articles about the migrant workers driven to California from the Midwestern states after losing their homes in the throes of the depression: inclement weather, failed crops, land mortgaged to the hilt and finally taken over by banks and immense corporations when credit lines ran dry. Lured by promises of work aplenty, the Midwesterners packed their belongings and trekked westward to the Golden Space, only to pick up themselves facing hunger, inhumane conditions, contempt and exploitation instead. “Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned to mopish inflame before it dies,” Steinbeck described the result in one of his 1936 articles, collectively published as “The Harvest Gypsies;” and in another fragment (”Starvation Under the Orange Trees,” 1938) he asked: “Must the hunger become inflame and the enrage fury before anything will be done? ”
By the time he wrote the latter article, Steinbeck had already published one current addressing the agricultural laborers’ struggle against corporate power (”In Dubious Battle,” 1936) . Shortly thereafter he began to work on “The Grapes of Wrath,” which was published roughly a year later. Although the book would catch the Pulitzer Prize (1940) and become a cornerstone foundation of Steinbeck’s Literature Nobel Prize (1962), it was sharply criticized upon its release - nowhere more so than in the Midwest - and mild counts among the 35 books most frequently banned from American school curricula: A raw, brutally insist, yet incredibly poetic masterpiece of fiction, it continues to touch nerves deeply rooted in original society’s fabric; including and particularly in California, where yesterday’s Okies are today’s undocumented Mexicans - Chicano labor leader Cesar Chavez especially pointed out how well he could empathize with the Joad family, because he and his fellow workers were now living the same life they once had.
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Having fought hard with his publisher to fill the novel’s uncompromising come throughout, Steinbeck was weary to give the film rights to 20th Century Fox, headed by grand mogul and, more importantly, known conservative Daryl F. Zanuck. Yet, Zanuck and director John Ford largely stayed just to the novel: There is that sense of desperation in farmer Muley’s (John Qualen’s) expression as he tells Tom and ex-preacher Casy (Henry Fonda and John Carradine) how the “cats” came and bulldozed down everybody’s homes, on behalf of a corporate entity too intangible to truly enjoy accountable. There is Grandpa Joad (Charley Grapewin), literally clinging to his earth and dying of a stroke (or, more likely, a broken heart) when he is made to leave against his will. There is everybody’s brief joy upon first seeing Bakersfield’s rich plantations - everybody’s except Ma Joad’s (Jane Darwell’s), that is, who alone knows that Grandma (Zeffie Tilbury) died in her arms before they even started to disagreeable the Californian desert the previous night. There is the privately-run labor camps’ insist desolation, complete with violent guards, exploitative wages, lack of food and unsanitary conditions; contrasted with the relative security and more humane conditions of the camps accelerate by the Location. And there is Tom’s crucial development from a man acting alone to one seeing the back of joining efforts in a group, following Casy’s example, and his parting promise to Ma that she’ll get him everywhere she looks - wherever there is injustice, struggle, and people’s joint success. In an overall outstanding cast, which also includes Dorris Bowdon (Rose of Sharon), Eddie Quillan (Rose’s boyfriend Connie), Frank Darien (Uncle John) and a brief appearance by Ward Bond as a marvelous policeman, Henry Fonda truly shines as Tom; despite his smashing excellent looks fully metamorphosized into Steinbeck’s quick-tempered, lanky, reluctant hero.
Yet, in all its starkness the movie has a more optimistic slant than the novel; due to a structural change which has the Joads gripping from dreadful to acceptable living conditions (instead of vice versa), the toning down of Steinbeck’s political references - most importantly, the elimination of a monologue using a land owner’s description of “reds” as anybody “that wants thirty cents and hour when we’re payin’ twenty-five” to point to that under the prevalent conditions that definition applies to virtually *every* migrant laborer - and a greater emphasis on Ma Joad’s pragmatic, forward-looking contrivance of dealing with their fate; culminating in her closing “we’s the people” speech (whose direction, interestingly, Ford, who would have preferred to waste the movie with the image of Tom walking up a hill alone in the distance, left to Zanuck himself) . Jane Darwell won a much-deserved Academy-Award for her portrayal as Ma; besides John Ford’s Best Director award the movie’s only winner on Oscar night - none of its other five nominations scored, unfortunately including those in the Best Narrate and Best Leading Actor categories, which went to Hitchcock’s “Rebecca” and James Stewart (”The Philadelphia Narrative”) instead. Serene, despite its important success - also expressed in a “Best Report” National Board of Review award - and its marginally optimistic outlook, the movie engendered almost as distinguished controversy as did Steinbeck’s book. After the witch hunt setting in not even a decade later, today it stands as one of the last, greatest examples of a movie pulling no punches in the portrayal of society’s ailments; a type of film regrettably rare in fresh years.
“Ev’rybody might be unprejudiced one stout soul - well it looks that-a arrangement to me. … Wherever men are fightin’ for their rights, that’s where I’m gonna be, ma. That’s where I’m gonna be.” - Woody Guthrie, “The Ballad of Tom Joad.”
“The highway is alive tonight, but nobody’s kiddin’ nobody about where it goes. I’m sittin’ down here in the campfire light, with the ghost of dilapidated Tom Joad.” - Bruce Springsteen, “The Ghost of Tom Joad.”
Also recommended:
John Steinbeck : Novels and Stories, 1932-1937 : The Pastures of Heaven / To a God Unknown / Tortilla Flat / In Dubious Battle / Of Mice and Men (Library of America)
John Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath and Other Writings 1936-1941: The Grapes of Wrath, The Harvest Gypsies, The Long Valley, The Log from the Sea of Cortez (Library of America)
Steinbeck Novels 1942-1952: The Moon Is Down / Cannery Row / The Pearl / East of Eden (Library of America)
John Steinbeck: Travels with Charley and Later Novels 1947-1962: The Wayward Bus / Burning Shimmering / Sweet Thursday / The Winter of Our Discontent (Library of America)
America and Americans and Selected Nonfiction (Penguin Classics)
John Steinbeck, Writer: A Biography
East of Eden (Two-Disc Special Edition)
Of Mice & Men
Viva Zapata!
The Ox-Bow Incident
This is it! This is the movie to present to your preteen children to give them an conception of what it means to struggle for something, for the barest of necessities.
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John Steinbeck and John Ford did America proud, allowing us to peek inward to eye solutions for our social problems. As a country we would do well to do the same again.
Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) and Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) are the central characters of this film, but many other, richly defined, roles can be found here. The young husband who deserts his wife because he’s ashamed that he can’t provide for her … the waitress whose, somewhat hardened, heart is softened by the dilemma of the Joads … the Grandfather who dreams of California and eating grapes while their juice runs down his chin … the grieving father warning the Joads of the hard times ahead in California … and who can forget the family friend who refuses to leave Oklahoma, and slides further and further into insanity as his entire community disappears.
Each secondary member of the cast has something invaluable to add to the sage and the standout is the tremendous John Carradine as the disillusioned, x-preacher, Casey. It is Casey who helps Tom to spy the injustice in their ‘migrant’ world, and Casey who provides the supreme sacrifice and catalyst for Tom’s promised future of being “there” for the minute guy.
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Yes, this movie can descend victim to overt sentimentalism, but the underlying feeling of injustice is probably the main ‘character’ in the fable. While it’s overall theme can be depressing, you can’t serve but smile when Ma Joad says “We’re the people that live.”
I absolutely appreciate this movie, I judge you will too.
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