Land of Plenty

Rating: Null/10 (7 January 2015)

John Steinbeck published "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1939. A well-regarded work of early 20th century social realism, the novel watches as migrant farmers struggle to survive the Great Depression. Droughts, landowners, banks, business cartels, technological changes and strikebreakers weight down upon our heroes, but they stand tall. The novel ends with Tom Joad, one farmer's saintly son, vowing to defend the oppressed and the downtrodden. As Tom embarks upon his quest, ominous flood waters threaten to drown his family and, by extension, his social class.
Steinbeck's novel contains a famous sequence in which a farmer's home is demolished by a tractor hired by a bank. The angry farmer attempts to shoot the tractor's driver, but the driver insists that he is "only following orders". When the farmer counters that he will shoot the person who gave the orders, the driver replies that this too would be useless, as this individual is simply another bank employee. "Well, where's the president of the bank?" the farmer growls. The driver states that there is no president, only a board of directors who themselves receive their orders from the "East". "Where does it stop?" the farmer cries. "Who can we shoot? I don't aim to starve to death before I can kill the man that's starving me!" The reply: "Maybe there's nobody to shoot. Maybe the thing isn't men at all. Maybe it's a bad thing made by men, and by God that's something we can change!"
Steinbeck's point was clear. There is no individual who is ultimately responsible for the economic forces which are harming people. Rather, all individuals are complicit in, and beholden to, a system they are themselves a product of. Such a stance would get Steinbeck labelled "anti-American", "a liar", "communist" and "a Jew acting for Zionist-Marxist interests". His book was burned in the streets, attacked in Congress and banned from schools and libraries. The fact that his first wife was a communist, and that he publicly picked fights with FBI director J. Edgar Hoover, notoriously anti-union and anti-worker, only made things worse. Over the next few decades Steinbeck would be hounded by the state, and everything he wrote would wind up in a FBI document. It would later be revealed that he was put under government surveillance as early as 1935. Fearing attempts on his life, Steinbeck would buy himself a gun for self-defence.
John Ford directed "The Grapes of Wrath" in 1940. The film is regarded as a classic, was showered with awards, but Ford ultimately disliked the picture. The film's leftist slant rubbed against Ford's political conservatism, and the meddling hands of producer Darryl Zanuck oft irked the director. Zanuck is himself responsible for the film's hokey ending, which was installed without Ford's consent.
Ford's grievances aside, "Wrath" remains one the director's finest pictures. Like Steinbeck's novel, it watches as a family of Oklahoman farmers are torn from their land. Seeking employment, and respite from drought and sandstorms, they venture toward the state of California, the new Promised Land. Unfortunately their journey points only to broken promises and shattered dreams, an entire nation's notions of "manifest destiny" mocked along the way.
Ford has a number of exceptionally photographed pictures ("My Darling Clementine" and "Drums Along the Mohawk" especially). Aesthetically, "Grapes of Wrath" is every bit their equal. Poised between myth and social realism, the film boasts fine cinematography by Greg Toland, which is abstract in places, expressive, poetic, even ghostly. Unfortunately, like most realist and neo-realist works, which sanctify the poor, the film's photographic depiction of poverty is highly sentimentalised: a continuation of very specific type of Victorian-era aestheticization.
Like most John Ford films, "Wrath" features endless waggon trails, armies of travellers "heading west", bands of folksy old-timers, expansive vistas and puts a wonderful emphasis on "community". Unlike most Ford films, however, "Wrath" re-contextualises Ford's usual tropes and embeds them within a plot which counters the conservatism (and stands against the class-bias and implicit racism) of some of his more popular films. Ford would continue this trend with his next picture, "Tobacco Road".
"In the souls of the people, the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy," Steinbeck would write. The line, ominous, hinted not only at violent revolt, but the ushering in of a better society. This call for socialist solidarity is erased in Ford's film, which engages in subtle forms of depoliticization and which for the most part avoids Steinbeck's critiques of state, private property etc in favour for populist boss-bashing. Leading the charge is actor Henry Fonda, who plays Tom Joad. Like his role in Ford's "Lincoln" some years earlier, Tom's part folk hero, part Jesus Christ, a homespun redresser of social wrongs.
Ford and Zanuck dilute Steinbeck's novels in other ways. "The old methods of intimidation and starvation perfected against the foreign peons are now being used against the white workers," Steinbeck would write, the author aware of America's long history of exploitation. Indeed, the refugees from the dust bowl accounted for only six percent of the southwestern migrants to California. Most were Mexican and Filipino workers, but this doesn't fit Ford's view of quintessentially white, rugged, American pioneers. The film is also wary of pointing fingers at the state (the land retirement policies of the US government – like the notorious Agricultural Adjustment Act, which was designed to artificially inflate the cost of crops – were instrumental in displacing farmers and landowners) and ignores the confluence of forces (The Depression, the collapse of the tenant system, the rise of mega-agribusinesses, mechanised farming etc) which were pushing people into poverty. Expecting such nuance from one of the most mainstream directors and producers of the era is silly, but it nevertheless partially explains why Ford and Zanuck received comparatively little resistance when assembling their film.
8.9/10 – Masterpiece. See "Wendy and Lucy", "The Wild River", "Bound for Glory", "Bread and Roses" and "Land of Plenty".