The Geometry of Underclass Frontiersmanship in The Grapes of Wrath

Rating: Null/10 (12 March 2013)

John Ford's "Grapes of Wrath" captures the salt-of-the-earth Dust Bowl destitution of the Steinbeck novel from which it is adapted. The Joads' trek west is every bit as entrepreneurial as that of the emerging agricultural barons for whom they toil, albeit motivated by survival rather than riches. Position is everything, whether that means fighting to stay or conniving to leave. Ford's cinematography, dialog, and plot bring land to life as another character in the film, animated by the Joads' do-or-die movements across it.
From the opening shot, the terrain is something to be contended with. A high-angle exterior shot of our protagonist Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) walking down the road photographs ground more than half-way up the celluloid. (Perhaps the geometry of this shot influenced that of the crop-duster scene in Hitchcock's "North By Northwest"). Intersecting roads and telephone wires create a rectilinear lattice confining the shot's subject, telegraphing how confined Joad's choice-set will prove. (The store he walks into is called "Cross Roads.") More high horizons— most memorably, a high-contrast night shot of the sheriffs' ominous headlights bearing down on the Joads' old house—further the impression that the distance the Joads must traverse is a wall they must drive through.
If the wealthy typically speak of nouns they own and the healthy, of verbs they do, those tethered to the plane beneath their feet for bare subsistence—the Joads—speak in prepositions. Their life is cartographic. When the Joads can occupy their land, they're "on it," and when they're evicted, they're ordered to "get off" and they're "throwed off." Now, their aim is not stillness, but control of position; seeing Tom, Grandpa exults, "They couldn't keep him in!" "You can't keep a Joad in jail!" The scene evolves into a comedic sketch in which just about everyone asks Tom if he "busted out." The family's watchword is "across": they have got to keep marching *across*, even if the grueling pace costs Grandma her life. Similarly, compass directions—those siblings of prepositions—are ever on the tip of the tongue, furnishing, for instance, a pretense for the family's escape from the farm (they had gotten a job "up north").
Plot developments will confirm our sense that the earth has heft—heft enough to kill (if their jalopy craps out in the desert, as the gas station attendant warns them), or enough to nourish (if its fruits will command five cents a bucket rather than two-and-a-half). Even minor plot details reinforce the primacy of terra firma: when burning family mementos before embarking, Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) spares a souvenir of the Louisiana Purchase. Now *that* was a deal on a plot of land.
As for Tom, he made it from prison to Oklahoma to California and now he's got too much momentum to cast anchor. Where to next? "I'll be everywhere," he tells us in his final monologue. "Wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there." And for all his work in the dry dirt, he's finally transcended the terrestrial: "I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad. . . . And when people are eating the stuff they raise, living in the houses they build, I'll be there, too."