american classic

Rating: Null/10 (19 December 2001)

Watching "The Grapes of Wrath" 60 years after its release, one still asks: How did Hollywood allow this film to be made? But as viewers, we are cheered that Darryl Zanuck permitted John Ford and his cast to tell an important story. Although inferior, I think, to John Steinbeck's source material, arguably the greatest American novel, the film is brutally frank about terrible conditions imposed upon Americans. Gregg Toland's unsparingly bleak cinematography dominates the film; the scene in which the Joads ride into the labor camp is so unsettling that I am relieved when the camera stops panning the other residents and returns to the Joads. The unspoken resentment of the new arrivals is palpable; they are not looked upon as fellow Americans but as enemies: more people looking for work, more hungry mouths to feed. The Joads don't have much but when Ma Joad cooks something for dinner, it's as if Pa Joad can hear the rumblings of every hungry belly in the camp when he tells Ma, "I can still see them in the tent."
The acting is uniformly superb with Henry Fonda giving the necessary edge to Tom's character and Jane Darwell word perfect as the matriarch of the Joad family. The scene in which Ma models a pair of aged earrings in a faded mirror before leaving for California ranks with the greatest in American cinema. The first and last scenes of Ma and Tom together are guaranteed to touch one's soul. The story is too grim to support a happy ending, but what we have is about the best that can be hoped for, with Ma Joad reassuring her loved ones that "they can't lick us because we're the family."