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THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Directed by: John Ford.
Produced by: Darryl F. Zanuck & Nunnally Johnson.
Written by: Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by John Steinbeck.
Director of Photography: Gregg Toland.
Edited by: Robert L. Simpson.
Music by: Alfred Newman.
Released by: 20th Century Fox.
Country of Origin: USA. 128 min. Not Rated.
With: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell & John Carradine.
DVD Features: Commentary by film scholar Joseph McBride and Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw. U.K. Prologue. “Darryl F. Zanuck: 20th Century Filmmaker” documentary, from A&E's Biography. Movietone Newsreel Clips and Outtakes. Restoration comparison. Photo gallery. English & Spanish Audio. Spanish subtitles.

The 1940 film adaptation of John Steinbeck's novel opens on an empty intersection, out of which emerges a scrawny figure. He is Tom Joad (Fonda), a convict out on parole, attempting to get his life back together in 1930s Oklahoma, a process complicated by the Dust Bowl drought, as well as the Joad family's being driven out from their land as a result a foreclosure. So begins the clan's journey as migrant workers to a better life in California, where they endure the abject conditions and suffering that were part of the Okie transient camp experience at the peak of the Great Depression.

John Ford directs the film crisply, using wide shots to economically encapsulate the mood and tone of Steinbeck's epic writing style. Human figures walk across the screen against a vast backdrop of clouds in the sky - a signature shot of Ford's. Steinbeck's prose lends itself, in some instances, quite well to Ford's form of storytelling. There is a tension present in the novel between the individual's needs and his or her obligation to society that emerges as a theme throughout Ford's oeuvre. The film is virtuosic in the way that it presents the dilemma of the choices the characters must make, and in its demonstration that their systemic economic problems must be responded to with a combination of self-interest and social empathy.

At some points, though, Ford's melodramatic film techniques become jarring. For example, despite the film's cinematography being hailed as documentary-like in its realism, director of photography Toland (who also did 1941's Citizen Kane) gives it a calculated sheen, particularly in the patterning of light and shadow. The performances, while strong, at certain points hit an overly broad comic note, due to the actors' delivery of lines; while sometimes devastatingly emotional, they often go for laughs, rather than talking in the knowingly laconic style of Steinbeck's writing. The emotional depth of Fonda and Jane Darwell (as Ma Joad) more than compensate for the film's flaws, though. When Tom vows to be spiritually present whenever oppression occurs, it is a tribute to Fonda whether Tom says this out of personal vigilantism or human solidarity, leaving the question open.

DVD Extras: The restoration comparison will be of note to film buffs, since it demonstrates the difference between not only the original film transfer and restoration, but between the film and digital video restoration processes as well. However, the differences might have been more noticeable had identical images been shown side by side rather than splitting the screen into two halves.

The A&E bio on producer Zanuck is entertaining and breezily informative, detailing the more creative role of the executive in the Hollywood studio system. Besides providing riveting personal gossip, it goes into how Zanuck was the first filmmaker to actually be in charge of a studio, and how he founded 20th Century Fox, balancing its slate of films, with both commercial fare, and more personal "social-problem" projects, such as The Grapes of Wrath.

The audio commentary is also insightful, with scholars McBride and Shillinglaw comparing Steinbeck's book and its film adaptation in terms of their different structures and emphases. One similarity they find, though, is in the manner the film, like the book, moves from purely individualistic concerns to more communal ones - a tension that goes back-and-forth, since, as McBride remarks, Ford himself adhered to a mixture of liberalism and conservatism. This is reflected in the film's ambivalent conclusion: the last scene with Ma Joad was, after all, added by Zanuck in order to have the film end on a more positive note than not only the book, but also Ford's original ending. Reymond Levy
June 16, 2004

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