Joads On The Road

Rating: 8/10 (14 April 2020)

In which John Ford holds up John Steinbeck's black mirror to America at the end of a decade which started with the Stock Market Crash, continued with the Great Depression and ended with the nation contemplating its world position as Europe entered into war. The question posed by Steinbeck, amplified elegantly here by Ford, is what happens to the little people, the working class, indeed the underclass who get squeezed the most when the checks and balances in society break down. It's also about how fickle human nature becomes when the haves indeed have power over the have-nots and how cheaply some people can sell their humanity to maintain that superiority.
The story is naturally episodic but the simple journey that the Joad family has to undertake to the much heralded promised land of California after being evicted from their land by the bank gives the movie a natural flow, although with this tale there are many more ebbs for the family to endure.
My criticism of other Ford films has sometimes been the sentimentality and forced masculine humour he frequently inserts but there's no room for either of these traits here. The nearest we get to one of his familiar tropes is the weekend dance at the "clean" government camp at which the Joads eventually arrive and are for the first time treated humanely by the staff, but even amongst the high spirits there's danger in the wings as the state troopers seek to gatecrash the party to make an arrest.
While there are twelve in the extended family which first hits the road, there are only eight of them alive by the time they reach the relative safe haven at the end as the elderly grandfather and grandmother expire on the journey and two others drop out. The main characters though are Henry Fonda's Tom Joad, the family matriarch Ma Joad played by Joan Darwell and the idealistic lapsed preacher Cristy, played by John Carradine. They each come to very different ends but the film does at least conclude on a vaguely optimistic note with stirring speeches of defiance and even hope by Fonda and Darwell, both of which in fact were interpreted by the soon to be all-powerful House Un-American Activities Committee as evidence of a Communist propaganda subtext.
Oscar-nominated Fonda is excellent as the combative, already road-hardened Tom, just released from jail for killing a man, who soon becomes the head of the family and so supersedes his father and his father in the hierarchy. Darwell won the Oscar as the Mother Earth character whose indomitable spirit drives the family on while Carradine memorably portrays a man who has lost his faith and who now channels his energies into human rebellion.
Ford (and screenwriter Nunnally Johnston), even if he does bend to the box-office by editing and tweaking events in the book to afford at least a smidgeon of optimism at the end, treats the text in a starkly realistic almost quasi-documentary style as befits the seriousness of the subject matter, aided in this by the masterful black and white photography of the acclaimed Greg Toland. The sense of abject poverty is manifest in the way Ford and Toland frame their cast's often gaunt portraits against dark skies and blasted landscapes.
This classic movie is a literary adaptation, history lesson and cry for social reform all rolled into one.