When Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) says at the end of The Grapes of Wrath, "wherever there's a cop beating up a guy, I'll be there" it makes clear what a radically populous film this is, especially today. It looks back to the landowners who drove people out of their homes during the Great Famine in Ireland and forward to today's Mexican migrant workers. The film, written by Nunnally Johnson, is fairly faithful to John Steinbeck's novel about Okies traveling to California from the Dust Bowl, exemplified by the sprawling Joad family, and represented by John Ford's stock company, including everyone from John Qualen and Ward Bond to Jack Pennick. It is beautifully photographed in black-and-white by Gregg Toland (who was the cinematographer for Citizen Kane the following year), with its subtly lit deep-focus shots of an American journey from Oklahoma to California that evoke the work of Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans.
The film is sometimes maudlin and sentimental and has a certain ponderousness common to Ford's more political films, e.g., The Informer (1935), and there is too much emphasis on Tom and his mother (Jane Darwell) to the exclusion of the rest of the family, to the extent one loses track of them. John Carradine is the other standout character, a minister who has lost his faith and is trying to find meaning in the randomness of life. The one place of refuge the Joads find on their journey is a camp run by the government, where there is a dance on Saturday nights and no cops are allowed without a warrant, and Tom wonders why there aren't more such camps.
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