profoundly unsubtle

Rating: 5/10 (31 January 2008)

This is a social conscience picture form the genres heyday. Although never described as such, the dust bowl was an American refugee crisis. Wrath follows some of the affected characters who are so poor they probably owe rent on their own skin. From the very first frame Gregg Tolands photography is amazing, whether it's simply a static composition or whether the camera is in motion.
John Ford, as Orson Welles has said, was an artist, but he's not particularly known for getting anything more than serviceable performances out of his corral. And usually any of the finer points of a performances are held a beat too long, or are notched up well past what is necessary, as are movies of the period.
But the real crime here is that the film's "nobility of the common man" pap is piled upon itself so high that a viewer begins to suffocate. A little of that goes a very, very very long way. I was shouting at my TV - "Oh please, will you move on. We got your thesis! Everyone GETS IT!" He also does this in They were Expendable. He does it in "How Green was my Valley." He doesn't do it in "The Quiet Man," which is a movie I like. In this world poverty is the signifier of moral righteousness. Grampa Joad gumming his way through addled, irritating, overacted speeches, and Pa Joad going for a bath with his junk flapping around are thrills I'd prefer to miss.
As is the tradition in Amercan films, if a man over 70 gets in a car for a long trip he ain't going to make it. As was his style, Max Steiner selects a musical motif and beats you to a pulp with it. Here it's Red River Valley. The crew ends up at a Utopian work camp as unreal as the epilogue in Raising Arizona. But the conflict is still pretty accurate about how conservative reactionaries generate phony causes to dismantle any peaceful, progressive threat to their viability. And it only hints at what complete thugs conservatives will become.