The Grapes of Wrath

Rating:
Summary: It was not as good as the book
Review: I read The Grapes of Wrath, and I loved the book. The book was so decriptive and was able to emotionally involve the reader in the story. The movie, however, was not as good. The book is so long, and the movie squeezed it into an hour and a half film. They left out important parts in the story and changed the sequence of events. The only reason I give this movie four stars because it's a "classic" and I really liked the story.

Rating:
Summary: "I'll be all aroun' in the dark."
Review: "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 terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on." - Battle Hymn of the Republic.

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 large corporations when credit lines ran dry. Lured by promises of work aplenty, the Midwesterners packed their belongings and trekked westward to the Golden State, only to find themselves facing hunger, inhumane conditions, contempt and exploitation instead. "Dignity is all gone, and spirit has turned to sullen anger before it dies," Steinbeck described the result in one of his 1936 articles, collectively published as "The Harvest Gypsies;" and in another piece ("Starvation Under the Orange Trees," 1938) he asked: "Must the hunger become anger and the anger fury before anything will be done?"

By the time he wrote the latter article, Steinbeck had already published one novel 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 win 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 still counts among the 35 books most frequently banned from American school curricula: A raw, brutally direct, yet incredibly poetic masterpiece of fiction, it continues to touch nerves deeply rooted in modern 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.

Having fought hard with his publisher to maintain the novel's uncompromising approach throughout, Steinbeck was weary to give the film rights to 20th Century Fox, headed by powerful mogul and, more importantly, known conservative Daryl F. Zanuck. Yet, Zanuck and director John Ford largely stayed true 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 hold 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 cross the Californian desert the previous night. There is the privately-run labor camps' utter 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 run by the State. And there is Tom's crucial development from a man acting alone to one seeing the benefit of joining efforts in a group, following Casy's example, and his parting promise to Ma that she'll find 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 friendly policeman, Henry Fonda truly shines as Tom; despite his smashing good 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 moving from bad 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 show that under the prevalent conditions that definition applies to virtually *every* migrant laborer - and a greater emphasis on Ma Joad's pragmatic, forward-looking way of dealing with their fate; culminating in her closing "we's the people" speech (whose direction, interestingly, Ford, who would have preferred to end 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 Picture and Best Leading Actor categories, which went to Hitchcock's "Rebecca" and James Stewart ("The Philadelphia Story") instead. Still, despite its critical success - also expressed in a "Best Picture" National Board of Review award - and its marginally optimistic outlook, the movie engendered almost as much 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 recent years.

"Ev'rybody might be just one big soul - well it looks that-a way 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 old Tom Joad." - Bruce Springsteen, "The Ghost of Tom Joad."

Rating:
Summary: Things that i find from this Movie
Review: Social Consequences of dis-location and Poverty:

"The Grapes of Wrath" is the story of an Oklahoma family moving to California during the Great Depression. They move to California to find better work and jobs, only to find that there is little opportunity. The family goes through rough times, but they hold together because they know that they can preserver. Henry Fonda plays an important role as Tom Joad. A convict out on parole, he goes with his family to California. Some experiences along the way help to change him and make him a better person. He soon realizes that people are more important and vows to devote his help to those who need it more and to those who aren't as fortunate.
The things which I found from the movie are:
•There were no written papers that can prove that land belongs to an individual at that time.
•Absolute poverty: people didn't have enough food and money to meet their basic necessities of life.
•Poor people were dependent on rich for their basic needs such as food, shelter and clothes.
• Monarchy System: Poor people were doing whatever rich people were saying them to do.
•Wages were low and workers had no rights to fight for their wages, working conditions etc.
•Tenant Farmers
•Unequal distribution of wealth.

Rating:
Summary: Ford and Fonda do justice to Steinbeck
Review: Take John Steinbeck's Pulitzer-Prize-Winning Novel. Turn it into a movie and let John Ford direct it, and get Henry Fonda to star. In 1940 you could hardly find a more certain recipe for a cinema classic.

As good as the film is, it really should be a companion-piece to Steinbeck's original masterpiece, and if you haven't read it I recommend setting aside enough time to read one of the greatest pieces of American literature ever written.

That being said, the medium of the cinema allows for a visual impact that can't be matched with the written word.

The Grapes of Wrath follows the Joad family during the great depression. That period of economic hardship hit the farmers in Oklahoma a little harder than the rest of the world, at the time of the dust bowl the "Okies" were at the end of their ropes, financially speaking.

Thousands of Okies packed up the house after being foreclosed and moved out to California - many winding up around Bakersfield, at the California end of old US Route 66. (Merle Haggard's family did so and the "Okie from Muscogee" wrote about it in songs like "California Cottonfields".)

Anyway, this is the historical context of the movie. The theme of the movie, and of Steinbeck's book, is the ability of the human spirit to remain intact in these worst of times. The Joads suffer terrible humiliations, one after another, most of them because of their desperate financial status. But as the story proceeds we see that they are fundamentally decent, hard-working people, and every time life knocks them down they get back up, brush the dirt off themselves, and keep moving forward. As a national characteristic, this was an important trait because this was the generation that produced the hard-working, high-minded individuals who did important things like win World War II, followed by America's greatest financial flourishing and the Baby Boom. Tom Brokaw called them "America's Greatest Generation".

The cast is picture-perfect, with Henry Fonda as the spirited Tom Joad and John Carradine as the former preacher with a new social consciousness. Jane Darwell won a well-deserved Best Supporting Actress Award as Ma Joad, and the remainder of the cast is in every way equal to the story and the film.

Rating:
Summary: Excellent film - weak commentary
Review: Fans of John Steinbeck's masterpiece are bound to be somewhat disappointed by the structural and textural changes in John Ford's adaptation, especially the complete elimination of the controversial (even by today's standards) ending. In fairness, the late 1930's must be considered, in particular the (1) Communist "menace" in it's infancy, and the often spurious accusations leveled against labor rights organizations and their connections to the "threat" (real or imagined) of communism. (2) The very real threat of the California Farmer's Association - portrayed by Steinbeck as a neo-facist organization. (3) The strict Hays codes for "decency" in film. Given these substantial hurdles, it's amazing this film ever got made.

The Story: GRAPES OF WRATH deals directly with the plight of the migrant farm workers from Texas, Arkansas, Missouri and Oklahoma during the "dust bowl" of the early 1930's when a combination of over planting and record droughts decimated the farmlands of the lower plains states, forcing the Westward migration of entire communities not only in search of a better life, but for their survival. Steinbeck directs his focus on one family in particular, the Joads of Oklahoma, led by elder son Tom, who in time becomes filled with an almost missionary zeal in his determination to relocate the family to greener pastures. By the story's end, this reluctant warrior will achieve almost mythical status as spokesman for a movement. The journey to California is filled with disaster, small triumphs, hunger and thirst,love, death, sickness and prejudice. California, advertised as the land of milk and honey by ruthless businessmen seeking to exploit the cheap labor, turns out to be a hotbed of hatred and violence. The collision course of the migrant workers, FDR's Resettlement Administration funded to assist those workers, and the powerful California Farmer's Association controlled by even more powerful business interests, sets the stage for the drama after the Joads finally reach California and a new struggle begins.

The Film: Gregg Toland's starkly gray cinematography perfectly captures the mood of the novel, and even though many scenes are obviously filmed on a sound stage, the primary drawback seems to be a slight echo, which at times can be a bit distracting. The casting of Henry Fonda as Tom Joad could not have been better and the acting throughout is very good, especially Jane Darwell's portrayal of Ma Joad, the "rock" and moral compass of the family. There are so many brilliant scenes in this film that make up for the exclusion of text, creating a visual editorial that is actually more visceral than dialogue and clearly establishes the farmers interdependence and love of the land, that substance that gives them their identity and manhood. When the men can no longer provide for their families, you can see the change of status on their weary faces and then the women forge ahead almost instinctively to ensure the survival of the family in a changing environment. The only real letdown of the film is the ending, which considerably tempers the unrelenting intensity of the novel, and indeed of the previous two hours of brilliance.

The Commentary: The two "scholars" employed to provide commentary for this DVD edition, spend about a third of the time arguing whether Steinbeck became a conservative during the 1960's - a subject completely irrelevant to the discussion at hand. Furthermore, the connections they attempt to make between the plight of the dust bowl migrant workers of the 1930's and the Mexican workers so prevalent in today's agro business is absurd. Steinbeck's migrant workers were U.S. citizens that had worked their lands for generations, not illegals crossing the border because their own government continually refuses to provide redress for their plight. Additionally, the American migration of the 1930's often displaced Japanese and Mexican laborers. A more accurate comparison could have been made with the black population around the same time period and indeed all the way up until the 1960's. American citizens who were victims of prejudice within the borders of their own country by fellow citizens. Indeed, the Okie's (a negative epithet of the 1930's) were often called "white Negroes."


Rating:
Summary: A powerful movie!
Review: Good adaptation of Steinbeck's superb novel. The Joad family were farmers in Oklahoma (referred to as Okies) during the "Dust Bowl" years when drought caused a lot of farmers to lose everything.

There are promised work in California and pack up their dilapadated truck with their family including the grandmother (I wonder if the idea for The Beverly Hillbillies came from this) and have a grueling trip there. When they arrive they are treated like "slaves," not even paid enough to buy food.

This was probably Fonda's best role as the noble Tom Joad. John Carridine is also excellent in a supporting role.

This film is historical and an important statement on how corruption lead to the formation of unions and workers rights!

Rating:
Summary: Grapes of Wrath
Review: Did hollywood really believe it could take a John Steinbech novel and turn it into a propaganda tool for socialism? Not quite. Having seen this film forty years ago, my recolection was a family of the dust bowl 1930's coping with the harsh realities of a changing deprssion era time.
Small family against big banking; david against goliath. The most graphic and telling sequence is when the evangeliquel government agent appears just as the
joad's truck quits working. The Joad's now have to coast their disabled truck to the lights that turn out to be a US Department of Agriculture "sanitary unit #4".
This film was made at the time, before the second world war and after FDR's welfare state programs. It is a reaffirmation of a program that has ensnared millions of people then, as well as now.

Rating:
Summary: A classic of the human condition
Review: I think it is most ironic that independent filmmakers claim to despise the mainstream Hollywood film in favor of making "personal cinema". When one considers the work of director John Ford it becomes so obvious that he was very much a part of the "system" and yet made several stunningly personal films.

His films hold up well today because they display his personal love of character, land, place (there is a difference), time, honor, tradition and ritual. THE GRAPES OF WRATH is one of his finest pictures. His obsessions and political leanings come to life in Steinbeck's haunting, searing and highly religious narrative.

I agree with many other reviewers who believe that the film is largely leftist propaganda. Certainly the other great political film directors Leni Reifenstahl and Sergei Eisenstein can be see in many of Ford's compositions- as is the case with the masked tractor trooper montage. But propaganda, like the very medium of film itself, operates on pure emotion. This film is loaded with one emotional image after another.

The photography of Gregg Toland matches the best of Life Magazine in its immediacy and realism, while at the same time dramatically recapturing the best of German Expressionsim. There are so many frames that could stand proudly next to the works of Adams, Bourke-White, Wood and Robert Capa as examples of photographic art.

The cast is uniformly excellent. The sincere and utterly real performances of John Carradine, Russell Simpson, Jane Darwell, John Qualen and the great Charley Grapewin all give performances that are on the level with anything ever produced from an Actor's Studio graduate.

Enough cannot be possibly said about Henry Fonda's performance as Tom Joad. How fitting that Fonda would play Henry Stamper in the film version of Kesey's SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION as Old Henry S. really is in many ways Tom Joad all grown up. Simply put it is one of the finest characterizations ever captured on film. He was not just an American icon, he was a fine dramatic artist.

The script retains much of the best of Steinbeck's novel and many of its great quotes. Yes, it does preach, but never at the expense of the narrative. This is a lesson so many "serious" filmmakers have yet to learn. The film has not dated in THE GRAPES OF WRATH is about a specific time and place in American History yes, but it is also about what it means to be a human being. In that sense it transcends nationalism and is a fine work of World Literature. It is an equal with CITIZEN KANE as one of the finest films ever made.

Now finally available on a beautiful transfer DVD, THE GRAPES OF WRATH, with his glowing silver and black images belongs on any serious film fan's shelf.


Rating:
Summary: Grapes of Wrath
Review: Grapes of wrath takes place in the great depression and focuses on the Joad family. The Joads are forced to leave their home and head to California to find work.Henry Fonda is excellent as Tom Joad. Jane Darwell deserved the oscar she got for her performance in this movie. Sure, many people have forgotten about this movie and it isn't as well known as movies like Citizen Kane.But great movies are often overlooked and in my opinion this movie is great and worth seeing.

Rating:
Summary: Henry Fonda in John Ford's version of John Steinbeck's novel
Review: I have absolutely no problem with the idea that the greatest ending in American literature comes on the final pages of John Steinbeck's novel "The Grapes of Wrath." The symbolism of the final image of Rosasharn and the starving man is as potent as anything every found in an American novel, whether you are talking white whales or green-tinted glasses and silver slippers. But there is no way on earth that a Hollywood film made in 1940 was going to film that scene and Nunnally Johnson's adaptation of Steinbeck's novel, which had only been published in 1939 when the censors were in apolexy over Clark Gable saying the word "damn," has to come up with a suitable but obviously inadequate substitute.

While Johnson remains remarkably faithful to the novel for most of the film, it is helpful to remember that a year earlier he had written the screenplay for "Jesse James," and there is clearly a sense in which the Tom Joad of this film is a "good" outlaw in a similar sense. The difference is that instead of joining the Confederacy this Tom Joad becomes a union man. Tom (Henry Fonda) has just gotten out of prison and hitches a ride home in time to find that his family is being forced off of the Oklahoma farm that they have been sharecropping. So the entire Joad family, Pa (Russell Simpson), Ma (Jane Darwell), Grandpa (Charley Grapewin), Rosasharn (Dorris Bowdon), and the rest pile into the family truck, joined by Casy (John Carradine in by far his finest role), a defrocked preacher who has a new, more human gospel to preach. The truck heads for California, the family hoping that this is the Promised Land it is claimed to be in the handbills blowing across the Oklahoma landscape.

Tom was in prison for killing a man who had stabbed him in a barroom brawl and at the end of this film he will kill again when he reaches a breaking point in the treatment that the migrant workers are enduring at the hands of the thugs wearing badges. In the difference between those two murders is the transformation of Tom Joad from a brawler in to a fighter and more specifically a fighter with a cause. Along the way is a journey that is as much a descent into Hell as the one Virgil took Dante on in "The Inferno," with the horror being that this is taking place in America and (for the original film goers), in the present as well. The Joads struggle to stay alive and stay together, and it seems that they are not going to be able to afford pride or dignity.

The flaw in the film, if you are inclined to see it that way, is that Joad becomes a Christ-figure (with Casy forced into the John the Baptist role). But pay attention to Tom's memorable closing speech to Ma Joan: "I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too." Yes, Tom Joad is out there fighting for the little guy, but the problem is that since Tom Joad is out there, we do not have to be. We wish him well and certainly root for him as he walks out to meet his destiny, but like Ma Joad we are going to stay behind and leave it to our hero to go fight the good fight. The film's final line, which belongs to Ma Joad, sounds like something we would expect from a Capracorn movie.

Director John Ford directs this black & white film with the same sense of human spectacle set against the grandeur of the American landscape that he displayed in his westerns "Fort Apache" and "Rio Grande." Put this is the end of that grand Old West, where cattle barons and sodbusters have given way to giant, nameless companies who gobbled up the land even when the winds have turns it into a Dust Bowl. The black & white cinematography by Gregg Toland provides a documentary like nature, recalling Dorothea Lange's famous 1936 photograph "Migrant Mother."

Ford and Darwell won Oscars, but Alfred Hitchock's "Rebecca" and Jimmy Stewart in "The Philadelphia Story" won for Best Picture and Best Actor respectively. Yet today it is clearly "The Grapes of Wrath" and Henry Fonda's performance that are a quintessential part of our American film heritage (Did you know that until 1958 it was "The Grapes of Wrath" that was considered the greatest American film and not "Citizen Kane"?). For a decidedly different but no less effective version of the story adapted by Frank Galati for the Steppenwolf Theater of Chicago check out the 1991 stage version with Gary Sinise as Tom Joad which ends as the novel does, with the mystical smile on the face of Rose of Sharon.