"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."
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 Bright / 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
John Steinbeck and John Ford did America proud, allowing us to look inward to discover 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 plight 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 story and the standout is the great John Carradine as the disillusioned, x-preacher, Casey. It is Casey who helps Tom to recognize 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 little guy.
Yes, this movie can fall victim to overt sentimentalism, but the underlying feeling of injustice is probably the main 'character' in the story. While it's overall theme can be depressing, you can't help but smile when Ma Joad says "We're the people that live."
I absolutely love this movie, I think you will too.
Buy The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Now
It's striking how many reviewers here base their comments on a simplisitic comparison between the film version of "The Grapes of Wrath" and the Steinbeck novel on which it was based. For many such a comparison seems to function simply as an excuse to proclaim the inherent superiority of the Steinbeck original--and, by extension, the superiority of their own literary taste values-when all it really does is highlight the patent silliness of trying to pit different artforms into some sort of evaluative competition. Literature and cinema are two vastly different modes of representation each with their own strengths and limitations, so the framing question shouldn't be which version of "The Grapes of Wrath" is "better"--as if there were a universal yardstick with which to measure such things--but rather how do they perform in terms of their respective mediums? On that count, I think we are extraordinarily fortunate with both the Steinbeck and Ford versions of "The Grapes of Wrath" to have two masterworks that operate consummately at the peak of their respective artforms. What each does well, it does brilliantly. As a verbal medium that unfolds slowly, literature is good at offering rich, layered descriptions of person and place and mapping complicated narrative links and Steinbeck makes the most of this in his novel. Cinema, by contrast, is an expressive medium that works best through registers of visual and aural metaphor, allegory and performance...and it's on this ground that I think the film version of "The Grapes of Wrath" more than merits its classic status. It is a magnificently "cinematic" film that uses the expressive capacities of the medium to produce a richly layered experience that is truly moving and that lingers long afterward, sometimes for years or even a whole lifetime. I first saw "The Grapes of Wrath" on TV one rainy afternoon in my childhood and it left indelible impressions that have impelled me to go back to the film time and again: The haunted eyes of Jane Darwell's Ma Joad as she sits in the truck cabin, lit from beneath, driving into an uncertain future, the winds of history howling oustside; the terrifying collision montage as the monstrous "cats" move in to destroy the Okies' homes; the soulless gas station attendants, standing together in uniforms like corporatized automata, muttering that the Joads are too miserable to be human. It's a film dense with iconic richness and an enduring testament both to the artistry of the many workers that created it, and to the democratic spirit of popular cinema at its very best.Read Best Reviews of The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Here
This is a review of the new BD of the classic film "The Grapes of Wrath".First off, when reading reviews of this title be aware that Amazon has a policy of grouping ALL reviews of ALL versions of a film, whether DVD, Blu-ray (and even VHS). So if you are looking for a review of the Bluray, sort reviews by date (with most current first). That should help guide you.
With that said, this is a review of the single-disc BD released on June 5, 2012.
"The Grapes of Wrath" (TGOW) is a classic film and one that everyone should see. It's re-release by Fox is timely as much of the US is still in a recession and unemployment is high. There are many folks re-locating from their homes (if they haven't been evicted already) looking for work. If you want to know more about the film and its plot, there are over 160 reviews here that will provide that info. So I'll concentrate on the BD release, it's special features and not on the film itself.
TGOW was filmed in black and white in a standard format of 1.33:1 so no matter what screen aspect your TV has the image will be virtually square. Even on an older non-flat screen TV the image does not fill the screen but has thick black border on all sides. Direct John Ford used dark images (and lots of great shadows) to tell the story and , though the BD image is brighter than previous releases, it show the graininess of the film. I also noted in the early scenes that the brightness would waiver, but I got used to it as I concentrated on the story.
The BD has, as special features, a commentary track (same as on previous DVD release) that I did not listen to, a series of short Fox Movietone newsreels about the dust bowl and the Academy Award presentation to actress Jane Darwell (who won the award for Best Actress but is not even given recognition by name on the package despite a fabulous performance) totally about 8-minutes. There is also a 25-minute piece from the Fox Legacy TV show (on Fox of course) with Tom Rothman. I tried to get into it but Rothman is frankly not a good speaker and I found a bit too pompous for my tastes. Despite playing with the Display Aspect control on my BD player, I found that the excerpts from the film that were included in Rothman's piece, were out of "ratio" and the image was "squished". I'm not sure how this plays on other TVs. The BD also gives you the option of watching the film with the "forward" included in the British release, which the producers decided was necessary to explain the economic conditions in the US to the British theater audience. A nice touch for completeness. The last bonus is an A&E episode on Producer Daryl F. Zanuck (that I haven't gotten to yet.).
Having read a few other reviews of the DVD version here, it appears that the DVD version has a sharper image than the BD, despite a few more dark spots. I can't tell if the images in the bonuses are any different as I only have the BD.
So, while I generally would turn to a BD version over the DVD version, I think in this case there is more reason to get the DVD than the BD. But, if you haven't seen this film before, with great acting by Henry Fonda and Darwell, then get it in either version. Just get it.
My rating is a bit skewed. The film gets five stars (I love it), the bonuses three stars (it's OK) and formatting between 3 and 4 stars.
I hope you found this review both informative and helpful.
Steve Ramm
"Anything Phonographic"
Want The Grapes of Wrath (1940) Discount?
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.
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