| The Grapes of Wrath | |
|---|---|
.jpg) Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | John Ford |
| Screenplay by | Nunnally Johnson |
| Based on | The Grapes of Wrath byJohn Steinbeck |
| Produced by |
|
| Starring | |
| Cinematography | Gregg Toland |
| Edited by | Robert L. Simpson |
| Music by | Alfred Newman |
| Distributed by | 20th Century-Fox |
Release date |
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Running time | 129 minutes |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $800,000[1] |
| Box office | $1.6 million(rentals)[2] |
The Grapes of Wrath is a 1940 Americandrama film directed byJohn Ford. It was based onJohn Steinbeck's 1939Pulitzer Prize-winningnovel of the same name. The screenplay was written byNunnally Johnson and the executive producer wasDarryl F. Zanuck.[3]
The film tells the story of the Joads, anOklahoma family ofsharecroppers, who, after losing their farm to increased mechanization during theGreat Depression in the 1930s, becomemigrant workers, and end up inCalifornia. The motion picture details their arduous journey across the United States as they travel to California in search of work and opportunities for the family members, and features cinematography byGregg Toland, who was on loan fromSamuel Goldwyn Productions.
The film is widely considered to be one of thegreatest films of all time. In 1989, it was one of the first 25 films selected by theLibrary of Congress for preservation in the United StatesNational Film Registry for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".[4][5]
After being released from prison, Tom Joadhitchhikes his way to his share-cropper parents' farm inOklahoma. Along the way, he comes upon Jim Casy, a formerpreacher whobaptized him, but has since lost his faith. He goes with Tom to the Joad property. It is deserted but they find neighbor Muley Graves, who is hiding out there. Graves describes how the local farmers were forced from their farms by the land deedholders, who knocked down their houses with tractors.
Tom soon reunites with the family at his uncle's house. The Joads are migrating with other evicted families to the promised land ofCalifornia. They pack everything into a dilapidated car adapted to serve as a truck to make the long journey. Casy decides to accompany them.
The trip alongHighway 66 is arduous, and it soon takes a toll on the Joad family. The elderly Grandpa dies along the way. The family parks in a camp and meet a migrant man returning from California. He scoffs at Pa's optimism about opportunities in California and speaks bitterly about his experiences in the West. Grandma dies when they reach California. Eldest son Noah leaves the family.
The family arrives at the first transient migrant campground for workers. The camp is crowded with other starving, jobless, and desperate travelers. Son-in-law Connie deserts his pregnant wife, Rose-of-Sharon. After seeing trouble between the sheriff and an agitator, the Joads hurriedly leave and go to another migrant camp, the Keene Ranch. After working in the fields, they discover the high food prices in the company store, the only one in the area. When a group of migrant workers isstriking, Tom wants to learn more about it. He attends a secret meeting in the dark woods. When the gathering is discovered, Casy is killed by a camp guard. Tom inadvertently kills the guard while defending himself.
Tom suffers a serious cheek wound, making him easily recognizable. That evening, the family hides Tom when guards arrive searching for who killed the guard. Tom avoids being spotted, and the family leaves the Keene Ranch without further incident. After driving awhile, they arrive at the Farmworkers'Weedpatch Camp ("Wheat Patch"), a clean facility run by theDepartment of Agriculture, complete with indoor toilets and showers, which the Joad children have never seen before.
Later, at one of the weekly Saturday night dances held at the Wheat Patch, a group of strangers arrive to instigate a riot as a pretext for local law enforcement to storm the camp and arrest the leaders. The camp committee men have anticipated this and subdue the strangers when they attempt to start a fight, leaving the law no choice but to abort their plan.
Tom is moved to work for change by what he has witnessed in the various camps. When police officers arrive looking for the murderer of the guard Tom killed, he decides to leave, telling his mother that he plans to carry on Casy's mission by fighting for workers' rights. As the family moves on again, they contemplate the fears and difficulties they faced, with Ma firmly vowing that their kind will continue to live on.
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The first part of the film follows the book fairly closely. However, the second half and the ending in particular are significantly different from the book. While the book ends with the downfall and break-up of the Joad family, the film switches the order of sequences so that the family ends up in a "good" camp provided by the government, and things turn out relatively well for them.[6]
In the novel, Rose-of-Sharon ("Rosasharn") Rivers (played in the film byDorris Bowdon) gives birth to astillborn baby. Later, she offers her milk-filled breasts to a starving man, dying in a barn. These scenes were not included in the film.
While the film is somewhat stark, it has a more optimistic and hopeful view than the novel, especially when the Joads land at the Department of Agriculture camp – the clean camp.[citation needed] Also, the producers decided to tone down Steinbeck'spolitical references, such as eliminating a monologue using a land owner's description of "reds" as anybody "that wants thirty cents an hour when we're payin' twenty-five," to show that under the prevalent conditions that definition applies to everymigrant worker looking for better wages.
The film emphasizes Ma Joad's pragmatic, forward-looking way of dealing with their situation despite Tom's departure, as it concludes with herspiritual "We're the people" speech.[citation needed][7]
Ivy and Sairy Wilson, who attend to Grandpa's death and travel with the Joads until they reach California, are left out of the movie entirely. Noah's departure from the family is passed over in the movie. Instead, he simply disappears without explanation. In the book, Floyd tells Tom about how the workers were being exploited, but in the movie he does not appear until after the deputy arrives in Hooverville. Sandry, the religious fanatic who scares Rose-of-Sharon, is left out of the movie.
Vivian Sobchack argued that the film uses visual imagery to focus on the Joads as a family unit, whereas the novel focuses on their journey as a part of the "family of man". She points out that their farm is never shown in detail, and that the family members are never shown working in agriculture; not a single peach is shown in the entire film. This subtly serves to focus the film on the specific family, as opposed to the novel's focus on man and land together.[8]
In the film, most of the Joad family members are either reduced to background characters – in the case of Al, Noah, and Uncle John – or to being the focus of only one or two relatively minor scenes – like Rose-of-Sharon and Connie. Instead, the film is largely concerned with Tom, Ma, and (to a lesser extent) Jim Casy. Thus, despite the film's focus on the Joads as a specific family rather than a part of the "family of man", the movie explores very little of the members of the family itself.
Executive producerDarryl F. Zanuck was nervous about the left-wing political views of the novel, especially the ending. Due to thered-baiting common to the era, Darryl Zanuck sentprivate investigators toOklahoma to help him legitimize the film. When Zanuck's investigators found that the "Okies'" predicament was indeed terrible, Zanuck was confident he could defend political attacks that the film was somehow pro-Communist.[9] CriticRoger Ebert believed thatWorld War II also helped sell the film's message, as Communism received a brief respite from American demonizing during that period.[10]
Production on the film began on October 4, 1939, and was completed on November 16, 1939. Some of the filming locations include:Oklahoma City,McAlester,Bridgeport, andSayre, all inOklahoma;Gallup,Laguna Pueblo,Santa Rosa, andSan Jon, all inNew Mexico;Thousand Oaks,[11]Lamont,Needles,Vidal Junction, and theSan Fernando Valley, all inCalifornia;Topock and thePetrified Forest National Park, both inArizona.[12]
The film score byAlfred Newman is based on the song "Red River Valley". Additionally, the song "Goin' Down the Road Feelin' Bad" is sung in a nighttime scene at a roadside New Mexico camp.
In an interview with George Bluestone for his 1957 book,Novels into Film: The Metamorphosis of Fiction into Cinema, John Ford confessed, "tersely, but with just the slightest trace of whimsy and bravado," that he had never bothered to read the Steinbeck novel.
The film premiered inNew York City at the Rivoli theatre on January 24, 1940. The wide release date in the United States was March 15, 1940.[13][14] It had a record total of 301 pre-release dates.[15]
It grossed $61,000 in its opening week at the Rivoli, which was its biggest draw sinceModern Times in 1936.[16]
Originally allowed to be shown in theSoviet Union in 1948 because of its depiction of the plight of people under capitalism, it was subsequently withdrawn because audiences were noticing that, as shown in the film, even the poorest Americans could afford a car.[17]
Boxoffice magazine said that the critical response in New York and Los Angeles was "preponderantly enthusiastic".[18]
Frank Nugent ofThe New York Times wrote:
"In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is one small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which by dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to be recalled not merely at the end of their particular year but whenever great motion pictures are mentioned. To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century-Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck'sThe Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Nunnally Johnson, directed by John Ford and performed at the Rivoli by a cast of such uniform excellence and suitability that we should be doing its other members an injustice by saying it was "headed" by Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine and Russell Simpson."[19]
Lee Mortimer of theNew York Daily Mirror called it "as brave a picture as has yet come out of Hollywood".Archer Winsten of theNew York Evening Post said it was "an unusually powerful exposition of a contemporary situation and problem". Eileen Creelman ofThe Evening Sun referred to it as "a magnificently directed picture that has no trace of entertainment value".[20]
When criticBosley Crowther retired in 1967, he namedThe Grapes of Wrath one of the best fifty films ever made.[21]
In a film review written forTime magazine by its editorWhittaker Chambers, he separated his views of Steinbeck's novel from Ford's film, which he liked.
Chambers wrote:
"But people who go to pictures for the sake of seeing pictures will see a great one. ForThe Grapes of Wrath is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book...Camera craft purged the picture of the editorial rash that blotched the Steinbeck book. Cleared of excrescences, the residue is a great human story which made thousands of people, who damned the novel's phony conclusions, read it. It is the saga of an authentic U.S. farming family who lose their land. They wander, they suffer, but they endure. They are never quite defeated, and their survival is itself a triumph."[22]
A review inVariety reported, "Here is outstanding entertainment, projected against a heart-rending sector of the American scene," concluding, "It possesses an adult viewpoint and its success may lead other producers to explore the rich field of contemporary life which films long have neglected and ignored."[23]John Mosher wrote inThe New Yorker, "With a majesty never before so constantly sustained on any screen, the film never for an instant falters. Its beauty is of the sort found in the art ofBurchfield,Benton andCurry, as the landscape and people involved belong to the world of these painters."[24] Writing in The Nation, criticJames Agee explained, "The Hollywood traditions of acting ...are incapable even at best of convincing one, except in the frankest kind of myth. I like the myths very well and some of the actors in them, but when there is any pretense whatever of portraying "real" people—as inThe Grapes of Wrath ... such actors are painfully out of place. Acting ... must inevitably develop a tradition, a style, which must as inevitably, in the long run, stultify and destroy itself."[25]
Martin Quigley, the editor of theMotion Picture Herald, acknowledged that the film was well done but said that it was an "emphatic item of evidence in support of the...assertion...that the entertainment motion picture is no place for social, political and economic argument." He said that the "audience import of the picture...becomes a demagogic preachment" and implied possible disbelief of the conditions portrayed "guided by the heavy and designing hand of John Steinbeck".[26] In response,Boxoffice magazine published a detailed response to how factual they felt the film was and Nugent inThe New York Times also responded, claiming that Quigley seemed to have very little respect for the mentality of the moviegoer.[27][28]
TheFilm Daily year-end poll of 546 critics nationwide rankedThe Grapes of Wrath as the second-best film of 1940, behind onlyHitchcock'sRebecca.[29]
On thereview aggregator websiteRotten Tomatoes,100% of 51 critics' reviews are positive, with an average rating of 9/10. The website's consensus reads: "A potent drama that is as socially important today as when it was made,The Grapes of Wrath is affecting, moving, and deservedly considered an American classic."[30]Metacritic, which uses aweighted average, assigned the film a score of 96 out of 100, based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".[31]
| Award | Category | Nominee(s) | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Academy Awards[32] | Outstanding Production | Darryl F. Zanuck andNunnally Johnson (for20th Century Fox) | Nominated |
| Best Director | John Ford | Won | |
| Best Actor | Henry Fonda | Nominated | |
| Best Supporting Actress | Jane Darwell | Won | |
| Best Screenplay | Nunnally Johnson | Nominated | |
| Best Film Editing | Robert L. Simpson | Nominated | |
| Best Sound Recording | Edmund H. Hansen | Nominated | |
| Blue Ribbon Awards | Best Foreign Language Film | John Ford | Won |
| National Board of Review Awards[33] | Best Film | Won | |
| Top Ten Films | Won | ||
| Best Acting | Jane Darwell | Won | |
| Best Acting | Henry Fonda | Won | |
| National Film Preservation Board | National Film Registry | Inducted | |
| New York Film Critics Circle Awards[34] | Best Film | Won | |
| Best Director | John Ford(also forThe Long Voyage Home) | Won | |
| Online Film & Television Association Awards[35] | Hall of Fame – Motion Picture | Won | |
American Film Institute recognition
The film was one of the first 50 VHS and Beta tapes released byMagnetic Video in 1977. The film was released onVHS in 1988 byKey Video and Laserdisc by CBS/FOX Video. It was later released in video format on March 3, 1998, by 20th Century Fox on its Studio Classic series.
ADVD was released on April 6, 2004, by 20th Century Fox Entertainment. The DVD contains a special commentary track by scholars Joseph McBride and Susan Shillinglaw. It also includes various supplements: anA&E Network biography of Daryl F. Zanuck, outtakes, a gallery,Franklin D. Roosevelt lauds motion pictures at Academy featurette, Movietone news: three drought reports from 1934, etc.
The film was released onBlu-ray on April 3, 2012, and features all supplemental material from the DVD release.
