The Grapes of Wrath (1940)—Some Critical Remarks

Ford's approach to the story was to follow his natural bent and subtly depoliticize it

through a different emphasis. "I was only interested in the Joad family as characters.

I was sympathetic to people like the Joads, and contributed a lot of money to them,

but I was not interested in Grapes as a social study."

Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (NY, 1999), 217

Nunnally Johnson: “The Facsists will say that it is purely communistic because it shows

nothing but greed, villainy and cruelty in the minds of all who are not paupers. The

Communists will say that it tends to Fascism, because it subtly shows that the country

ought to be regimented, regulated, and ontrolled from the top, so that such utter and

crushing poverty in the midst of surplus and plenty could not take place.”

Quoted by Rudy Behlmer , America's Favorite Movies: Behind the Scenes (NY, 1982), 124

Martin Quigley, in the Motion Picture Herald:

…the motion picture version of Grapes of Wrath…is a new and emphatic item of evidence in support of the frequently repeated assertion in these columns that the entertainment motion picture is no place for social, political, and economic argument. It is a stark and drab depiction of a group of incidents in human misery, told against a chaotic jumble of philosophic and sociological suggestion and argument.

It may be wondered why…such an unpromising field of material was prospected. The answer perhaps is a situation of reaction rather than initiative. Mr. Zanuck, while issuing a series of fine popular entertainments, probably had the term "escapist" hissed so often in his ear that he finally--and we hope reluctantly--decided to give them that which they like loosely to label as "significant." This he has done and well done.

There remain, however, to be measured the consequences to the screen and the consequences to reasoned judgment on those problems--political, social, economic, and religious--which the screenplay, guided by the heavy and designing hand of John Steinbeck, treats with.

Quoted by Rudy Behlmer, America's Favorite Movies: Behind the Scenes (NY, 1982), 132

When it opened on January 24, 1940, a bare five weeks after finishing production, The Grapes of Wrath was immediately acclaimed as a masterpiece. The Times called it “One of the cinema’s masterworks,” the Herald Tribune said it was “A genuinely great motion picture.” John Mosher in The New Yorker, whose disdain for the movies approached the universal, said that “It is a great film of the dust plains, the highways, the camps, of the sky above, and of a nameless, evicted people.”. . . One of the few dissenting opinions came from Martin Quigley, editor of the Motion Picture Daily [sic], an ardent Catholic and one of the co-authors of the censorship code. “If the conditions which the picture tends to present as typical are proportionately true,” thundered Quigley, “then the Revolution has been too long delayed. If, on the other hand, the picture depicts an extraordinary, isolated, and non-usual condition…then no small libel against the good name of the republic has been committed.”

Scott Eyman, Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford (NY, 1999), 224

And even though Ma's speech sounds "Fordian," and even though those final shots echo the primal Ford life-symbol, the parade, Ma's uncharacteristically prolix oration seems a tawdry resolution, in contrast to Ford's refusal to resolve. Nor is such sententiousness generally accorded Fordian characters without equal doses of irony. Of course, in this instance, it virtually destroys the film's trajectory toward inevitable disintegration/revolution, in favor of perseverance/abidance.

Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (Berkeley, 1986), 180

In The Grapes of Wrath, Fonda’s Tom Joad brings these variations on the populist hero together in a single heroic figure- agrarian, Lincolnesque, a fugitive and an outlaw- who is finally able to articulate the social and political meaning for which the outlaw has been a metaphor. The symbolic resonance produced by this intertextual echoing is most palpable in Fonda's last scenes, in which Tom says goodbye to his mother and sets out his vision of what a man has to do to set things right. Ma Joad is played by Jane Darwell, who has played Ma James; and her response, like Zee’s and Ma James’s, is to worry that Tom’s choice of an outlaw life will make him wild or “mean.” Tom reassures her by reaffirming his belief in the words of Preacher Casey [sic], that “a man ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a great big one.” The role of Casey is played by John Carradine, another member of the Jesse James cast. Tom says that since he is an outlaw anyway, he might as well try to talk to the people as Casey had done—to become, in effect, an organizer and agitator for some unspecified movement of the dispossessed to get decent jobs and (the Western movie’s vision of utopia) “a piece of land.” We last see him walking over a hill toward a sunrise—an image that echoes the final shot of Young Mr. Lincoln and suggests the essential unity of the populist outlaw and the Great Emancipator.

Richard Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 303

But in exposing gangsters, inhumane prison conditions, yellow journalism, and so forth, Warners did not meet the social problems head on; instead, the studio typically sidestepped issues by narrowing the focus of the expose to a specific case or by resolving problems at the personal level of the protagonist rather than at the societal level. Variety called the process “Burbanking,” referring to the location of Warners’ studio in Burbank, outside Los Angeles.

Tino Balio, Grand Design, 281

Classic Hollywood narration (a refresher): http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/film/classhollnarr.htm