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