People That Live

Rating: 10/10 (16 September 2000)

The movie itself is generally recognized as about as good (or great) as you can get, especially considering that it was shot in 33 days. But it often gets nailed for two scenes, one absent from the film, the other changed drastically. No Rosasharn is not seen in the film nursing the dying old man from her swollen breast. If the scene had been shot in 1939 (or even suggested), the movie would never have been released. The second problem often pointed out is that the ending is too upbeat, what with Ma Joad's carrying on about how men live their lives in jerks while women flow along like Anna Livia Plurabelle, and "we're the people that live." That last scene was written by Zanuck and was almost essential to a successful film in the late 1930s. Of course tragedies had been filmed for years, but ordinarily the tragic hero or heroine had earned his or her fate. Both audiences and authorities would have waxed wroth seeing an honest close-knit family crushed by an American economy that was totally inimical to their welfare. We need to look at art in the context of its time.
From the Marxist perspective that Steinbeck used in writing the novel, Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) is the protagonist but the two most important characters are Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) and Casey the Preacher (John Carradine). Ma represents what Marx called "false consciousness," the tendency to attribute our misery to our own flaws, to bad luck, or God's will. Ma Joad's solution is retrograde -- to hold the "fambly" together. Casey, on the other hand, discovers "class consciousness." It's not our fault. The flaw is systemic, and the solution lies in correcting the inequities in the system. Our allegiance has to transcend groups like the family and embrace all the exploited workers. The film endorses not Marx's revolution but a milder form of socialism -- the government-run labor camp with its democratic "sanitary units", and the emerging union movement with its collective bargaining. Steinbeck's polemic is more acid. The novel has a reference to the extremely wealthy William Randolph Hearst (better known as Charles Foster Kane) who is described as have "a mean face and a mouth like a a**hole." There aren't many references to communism either in the novel or the film, just a few remarks about "Who is these Reds, anyways?" Still pretty bold stuff for the 1930s with the public in one of its periodic Bolshevik scares!
No need for anxiety, though. By the late 1930s the Great Depression was easing up, and World War II was about to bring it to an end. Bakersfield now looks as if Tom Joad had made a successful escape and decided to open a chain of organic food stores.
This is a marvelous film. To single out just one shot, note when the Joads drive through the first starving Hooverville. The camera is mounted on the front of the old truck and travels slowly, without any cuts or dialog, through groups of wary, singularly ratty looking people, men and women, young and old, some resembling photos of criminals from old Police Gazettes, who "don't look none too prosperous."
If nothing else, the film is a valuable corrective to the current view that people are poor because they're lazy. How did one third of a nation become so terribly lazy in the years following the 1929 stock market crash?