John Ford’s version of Steinbeck is gentler than the book and one of the hardest things Hollywood made in its studio years. Gregg Toland lights it by lamp and headlamp, Henry Fonda barely raises his voice, and Jane Darwell holds the rest together.
John Steinbeck’s novel came out in 1939 and John Ford’s film was in British cinemas by 4 April 1940, which is fast for a book that size and that angry. Darryl F. Zanuck produced it and Nunnally Johnson wrote the screenplay, and between them they kept the road, most of the people and a good deal of Steinbeck’s dialogue. They took some of the fury out. What is left is one of the hardest-edged films a Hollywood studio made in those years, and we recommend it without much hesitation.
The Joads are tenant farmers in Oklahoma who have been cleared off their land by the bank, and the first half hour is about how that happened. Ford tells it through Muley Graves (John Qualen), found hiding in the emptied Joad house, and Gregg Toland lights the scene from one candle held under the men’s faces so that the room is black around them. Muley describes the day the tractor came, and Ford cuts to him kneeling in the dirt while a caterpillar knocks his house off its blocks. Nobody in the scene is a villain. The man driving the tractor is a neighbour’s boy who needs the three dollars a day.
Toland shoots the whole film this way, from a single source wherever he can: a lantern in a tent, a truck’s headlamps on a dirt road, a match. He went on to shoot Citizen Kane the following year and you can see him working out how much black a frame will stand. The picture we have not been able to put down is a quiet one. Before the family leaves, Ma Joad (Jane Darwell) sits alone by the stove with a box of keepsakes she cannot take, a postcard, a china dog, a pair of earrings, and holds the earrings up to her ears in front of a small mirror. It moved us more than we were ready for, and it did so because Ford holds the shot, Alfred Newman keeps the music out, and Darwell does not cry.
Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad as a man who learned in prison to keep his voice down and his hands still. He does almost nothing for long stretches, and then he moves, and the film moves with him. Darwell is the opposite, broad and unhurried, the person who decides when the truck leaves. John Carradine’s Casy, the preacher who has lost his calling and is talking himself towards a new one, is all elbows and long pauses, and his best scenes are the ones where he is listening. Charley Grapewin’s Grandpa, refusing to leave the land, gets the film’s one stretch of real comedy. Further down the cast, Dorris Bowdon’s Rosasharn and Eddie Quillan’s Connie are given less than they need.
The road itself is handled by editor Robert L. Simpson as a run of dissolves, road signs and the truck against the sky, and it is efficient and a little dutiful. The film moves less easily than Stagecoach, which Ford had made only the year before: scenes here tend to stop rather than end, as if the film were checking the book for what came next. Newman’s score is built almost entirely on one folk tune, Red River Valley, played on an accordion, and by the last reel it is doing feeling the images have already done. Gwen Wakeling’s costumes are right, though: Ma’s print dress washed to a grey, the men’s overalls worn through at the knee, nothing that looks as if it came from a wardrobe department.
The larger complaint, and it is the one most critics make, is that Johnson and Zanuck softened the politics. The book is angry at a system. The film is sorry for a family. The second half spends longer than it should in the one place along the road where the Joads are treated decently, and the argument about who owns the land and who owns the people who work it gets made in speeches rather than in what we see. We will not quote the famous one Fonda gives near the end. It is well delivered and it is still a speech.
None of that stopped us being got at, and we think it will not stop you. It is a PG, which is right; there is nothing here a child cannot see, only things a child will ask about. Watch it with the lights off. Toland lit it for the dark, and the faces need it.
