Torn from today's headlines?

Rating: Null/10 (7 November 2005)

As I write this, there has been rioting in the streets in Argentina and Brazil, rioting by the African and middle eastern immigrants in France and here in the US, tens of thousands of the poor remain displaced from their homes following Hurricane Katrina. A line from one of the best films of the year, "Secuestro Express," sums up perfectly all these people's common problem.
"Half the world suffers from malnutrition, the other half from obesity."
Even though it was made 65 years ago, "The Grapes of Wrath" is still relevant today, for the grinding poverty depicted in this film and the struggle to overcome it --in some cases just to survive it --remains today the all consuming battle for a large portion of the world's population.
We should not forget just how controversial John Steinbeck's novel was when it was first published all those years ago. Called socialist propaganda by politicians and branded a pack of lies by the big California farmers, the book went on to achieve great acclaim. Yet it and stories like it will always be lightning rods for controversy because they dare to suggest that what separates the halves and have not's is not always just how hard people are willing to work. Some of those who work the hardest --and there may be no harder work than stoop labor --wind up with the least.
Plenty of good hard work went into the motion picture version of this story of Dust Bowl immigrants of the 1930s trying to start a new life in California.
The film, of course, was the work of some of the best in Hollywood. Produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, one of the industry's greatest producers, adapted for the screen by Nunally Johnson (Jesse James), photographed by Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane); staring one of the screen's greatest actors, Henry Fonda, backed by a remarkable cast of character actors including Jane Darwell and John Carradine, and helmed by a candidate for the honor of Hollywood's greatest director, John Ford, this film was assembled like a fine Swiss watch, which is probably why it continues to tick today, well over half a century later.
Ford was at the top of his game when he undertook the project and its brimming with his unmatched visuals, thanks to the camera-work of Gregg Toland. From the opening shot of a solitary figure walking down a highway towards a diner, to shots of the Joad family, piled in their jalopy truck, passing through an Indian reservation in New Mexico, to the film's signature shot, as they wind their way through a transient camp outside Bakersfield, California, Ford and Toland use the camera to advance the idea that these are people on an odyssey, a search for a better life in a sometimes beautiful, but often hostile environment. Many directors are capable of making pretty pictures. Ford proves in "Grapes of Wrath" that you can tell a compelling story without a word being spoken.
But like all great movies, from Murnau's "Sunrise" to Coppola's "Godfather," this film is about a lot more than pretty pictures. The movie's words are powerful and haunting and resonate today. When John Qualen, playing the deranged sharecropper, Muley, describes how the Oakies have been pushed off their land by the banks; or when David Hughes playing a discouraged immigrant coming back from California empty handed, gives his dire warning about the perils the travelers face, you cannot help but be moved. And of course, there is Henry Fonda, who delivers his now legendary speech at the movie's end, as he sets out on his own to see what can be done about the plight of the poor. The screen may have never produced a better piece of dialog.
"The Grapes of Wrath" continues to stand today as a landmark of American movie making and a film well worth the time of anyone who wants to try to understand what for much of mankind remains the most important struggle --the struggle for survival..