The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

 

John Ford’s ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

 

The Western genre is without a doubt the foundation that supports John Ford’s oeuvre. With this genre, Ford is able to explore the firmament of the American dream. Ford’s Westerns take place in the late 19^th century in which Americans settle the Great West, and build their own utopia of individual freedom. These stories are the landscape for Ford’s philosophical questions regarding the battle between individualism and collectivism. Ford never answers the question of which is better. Rather, he uses his films to explore the advantages and disadvantages of both. Each of his films seem to weigh the costs of an impending society and its restrictions on individual freedom. With The Grapes of Wrath, Ford depicts the complete collapse of the American West and the total takeover by societal control.

With this film, Ford depicts the end of the American Dream. It takes place in the 1930s during The Great Depression. While the 19^th century settings of his films depict the settling of the American West, The Grapes of Wrath shows the ancestors of those American settlers being pushed off their ancestral lands. The American dream no longer belongs to any of them; and by extension – us. Rather, America belongs to the banks and large companies. Not only has uncontrolled capitalism destroyed the American dream for the common person, but it seeks to exploit them as well.

Another element of the Western is its existential fear of the impending and inevitable future. Because Westerns takes place in the late 19^th century, it becomes a period film. The period film element adds a level of retrospection for the viewer. Because the common viewer is aware that the wild and untamed West is no more, there is an added layer of metatextuality. The characters are unware that their way of life, and even themselves, are about to be overtaken. This takeover comes from industrial progress and a taming of the untamed West. This additional subtext provides an existential layer of becoming obsolete and forgotten in a changing world. We, the viewers, watch characters trapped in a doomed past, overtaken and thrown aside by the future. This forces the viewer to reconcile this notion with their own eventual irrelevance, by way of the changing of time, societal progress, and by extension - their own mortality and insignificance. The Grapes of Wrath is the final nail in the coffin of the American West, the 19^th century, and the characters themselves.

We open the film with the image of a crossroads, while a lone figure on the horizon slowly walks towards camera. This crossroads is Ford’s way of visually conveying that this film is about a crossroads, both for the characters and society at large. Even the gas station that the lone figure arrives at is called “Crossroads.” The lone figure is Tom Joad, who we learn was just released from prison and is headed to his parents’ ranch in Oklahoma. Through an exchange with a truck driver giving him a lift, we also find out that Tom was in jail for killing a man who came at him with a knife. 

Tom then meets a former preacher named Jim Casy along his trek back to his family farm. Now a homeless drunkard, Jim acts as the spiritual and existential poet of the film. While the characters are trying to navigate the harshness of the real world, Jim is navigating the spiritual reckoning of what it all means.

Greg Tolland, who would later go on to photograph Citizen Kane, contrasts and mixes the black and white in the imagery to create a grit to the photography. Most Hollywood films throughout the 1930s until this point had a starker contrast between light and darkness. Not only this, light would be somewhat overused, illuminating the screen with vast brightness. This provides the images on screen with a spotlight effect, creating an almost other-worldly and elevated visual style. This ‘Hollywood style’ is a style we are familiar with in regard to classic Hollywood cinema. With The Grapes of Wrath, Tolland and Ford scatter darkness throughout the image, creating a visual dirtiness. There are two results of this masterful design. The first is that of documentary style photography. The images, unlike the bright and pristine images of the Hollywood Style, create a visual realness. This documentary inspired style enlists the viewer to not just see this as a story removed from themselves, but as life and reality. The subject matter is enveloped with real world trauma, and Ford and Tolland try to convey this with their cinematography. The second result deals with the world the characters find themselves in. The dirtiness of the images creates a visual environment of decay. This is important to the understanding that the characters and their way of life blowing away. The cinematography of The Grapes of Wrath conveys a sense of the real world connective tissue that illustrates the decay of the American people.

Tom and Jim finally arrive at the Joad farm. They discover it has been abandoned, except for a man named Muley Graves who has been hiding out. The three men gather around the light of a candle as Muley recounts how farmers around the area were pushed off their land, including himself and his family. Through flashback, we are able to see these events unfold. When trying to get an answer to who is responsible for this, Muley is told that it is no one in particular. Rather, the banks and farming companies who own the land send caterpillar tractors to bulldoze farms in order to rid the landowners of unwanted residents. When trying to confront the man driving the bulldozing tractor, Muley discovers that it is a family friend who is just doing it for money to provide for his family. The economic hardships forced people to become dependent on money – money provided by those in power of holding it. With these images of caterpillar tractors, it becomes apparent that the new capitalist structure of 20^th century America is bulldozing the individualism of the Old West in favor of a new 20^th century modernism; in which those with economic means have the power to force the hand of those without those means.

Muley is telling Tom and Jim the story of how he lost his land, his family, and even his soul. Throughout, Ford uses darkness to flood the frames. Ford presents the scene almost like a horror film. The darkness surrounds the frame, even covering the edges of the character’s faces as the light from the candle flickers on their visage. The horror being conveyed here is that of Muley’s recognition of his own irrelevance. After the loss of his family, many of the local farmers abandoned their homes and property to go westward. Muley, on the other hand, remained. He now claims that he stalks the wasteland of abandoned farmlands, sleeping wherever he puts his head down. His says that he has become a graveyard ghost, a hollow shell of a human person. This presents the common feeling of what your life is worth and what it means. With these families having everything taken from them, they are forced to reconcile with their own meaninglessness. The darkness that Ford envelopes the screen with creates the existential horror of the characters’ dark lives and mindsets.

After the police arrive, the men must hide out in the corn stalks. Tom says, “If anybody told me that I’d be hiding out at my own place.” With this line, it becomes apparent that Tom has not accepted his own irrelevance like Muley has. He still views it as ‘his’ place – aligning with the characters’ notion that they have something that belongs to them.

Tom, along with Jim, leaves for his uncle’s house to hopefully find his family. As the two men travel, Ford films their small black silhouettes walking along the horizon, as they are swallowed up by the surrounding sky. The vast visual space makes their bodies appear exceedingly insignificant in the frame, aligning with the film’s recognition that the characters must reconcile their own insignificance. Their entire way of life, and even they themselves, are being swept away by the new world like tumbleweeds. The visual images Ford creates cements that notion, conjuring beautiful spaces that overwhelm the characters against the backdrop of eternity. 

*Note: a contemporary film, Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, takes inspiration from John Ford’s films. Nomadland deals with a character who must reconcile her own insignificance in the face of economic and social change. Zhao commented that she used Ford’s doorway scene from The Searchers for her film. Ford’s doorway scene in conveys that John Wayne’s character was being left behind by the new world, visually trapped by the doorframe in the Old West and trapped in the past. Frances McDormand’s character in Nomadland must also accept that she is trapped by her own human constraints of life and has become a relic of the person she once was in a world she no longer knows. This particular viewer has noticed a similarity between the below Nomadland shot and the above shot from The Grapes of Wrath. Frances McDormand must reconcile with her newfound realization of her own unimportance and mortality, much like the characters in The Grapes of Wrath. With these similar shots, the characters are being overpowered in the frame by the majesty of their environment. The vastness of the great sky and plains surrounding them visually overwhelms them in the image, making their human forms appear insignificant in contrast to the enormity and beauty of eternal sky.

Tom reunites with his family, who have aspirations of going west to California to find work. They fantasize over the lush environment as Grandpa muses about the abundant grapes he will consume. They still believe in the American West of their ancestors, thinking that they can traverse the Western terrain to settle down somewhere they can build their own utopia. They cling to a dream of paradise. They still hold tightly to their idealized expectations that this new life and new world will have room for them.

The trip is arduous and takes the life of both Grandpa and Grandma. The family stop at several migrant camps full of hungry and impoverished people living on the edge of society. They hear about work at the Keen ranch as they make their way to California. When arriving at the state line, they are stopped by police for an ‘agricultural inspection.’ This inspection is to check if they have any fruits or vegetables on their person. This is a bizarre encounter because California is full of fruit and vegetable farms. State authority now accredits the fruit and vegetable enterprises by keeping out an inflow of competing products. This presents another exploitation of the new 20^th century American capitalist structure.

They stop along the way at one of the transient camps. While there, a businessman and police officer offer the camp residents work, to which one resident proclaims the work to be too unfair a wage. The businessman tells the police officer to arrest the agitator, causing the officer to fire into the crowd, killing a woman. Tom attacks the officer. Jim convinces Tom to leave. After he does, Jim takes the blame and is promptly arrested. This is another example of the exploitation of the new capitalist society, as big business exploits cheap labor and uses police to deter dissent.

In Ford’s Stagecoach, the blaring of the trumpets signaled the cavalry was coming to save the day and protect the protagonists from attack by the native people. In The Grapes of Wrath, the blaring of police sirens now means trouble for the protagonists. Before, Native Americans were represented as unevolved relics of the past being exterminated by the new world of the 19^th century, as American individualism was building a new society on top of them. Now, the state in The Grapes of Wrath enforce the purging of its own citizens, just like the Old West cavalry did with the natives. It is in this way that, to Ford, the modern American has become the new native being ripped away from their ancestral land, forced to the margins of society, and left to be exploited and oppressed by the New World.

When the family arrives at the Keen ranch, they are welcomed in. Ford’s camera follows the family truck from behind as it enters the gates. Suddenly, a gruff looking man jumps out onto the path into frame, shouting, “No! Don’t go in!” as if to warn the viewer that this ranch is a trap. We go into the camp with unease, matching Tom’s unease when he says that he doesn’t like the look of it. The gates close behind them as if to lock them in. Ford then presents a shot of the transient caravan driving single file down the path towards the camp. The shot looks visually comparable to the caravan shot from King Vidor’s 1925 film The Big Parade. The shot from Vidor, in its context, signifies that the military men are parading to their demise like cattle. With this metatexual visual congruence, Ford creates an air of doom in relation to what will unfold for the family.

The above shot is from The Big Parade.

After doing some work in the fields, they discover high food prices in the company store – a store that is the only one in the area. They are forced by guards to not roam the premises and are only allowed to stay in their designated living quarters at night. They are treated more like prisoners than employees. Tom escapes at night and discovers Jim with a group of striking migrants during a secret meeting. When the meeting is discovered by police guards, Jim is killed. Tom then kills the officer and runs off. Tom suffers a wound to his cheek, leaving him more readily identifiable. Because of this, the family leaves. We learned in the beginning that Tom killed a drunkard in self-defense. The man Tom kills now is not a violent drunkard, but a police officer. The killing of these two men demonstrates the change in Tom’s anger. Tom realizes that the real enemy in not his fellow man, but the mechanisms of authority and control.

The family discover another migrant camp: Farmworkers’ Weedpatch camp, a clean camp run by the Department of Agriculture, complete with indoor toilets and showers. This camp presents a structure of hope for the corrupted new world. The workers elect their own representatives and police force. When outside agitators try to frame a riot at the local dance night, they are thwarted by its community. Tom decides to leave to follow Jim’s path of being committed to fight for social reform. The stark reality of this new world has made his family irrelevant. His only choice now is to fight for relevance.

He leaves and we are once again shown the shot of his tiny silhouette on the horizon overwhelmed by the sky. He and his family continue to hope for a place in this world and continue to fight for survival. Ma says, “Rich fellas come up and they die, and their kids ain’t no good and they die out, but we keep a-coming. They can’t wipe us out, they can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, cause we’re the people.” These final lines are an act of defiance to their own inconsequentiality. Even as we continue to watch them being shoved away by the 20^th century, they continue to fight. With this, the film takes on a bittersweet viewpoint. In the face of your own meaninglessness, you must continue to persevere and not let life overtake you.

Ford’s depiction of John Steinbeck’s novel clears it of its excrescences, allowing for a more bare-boned telling of an intimately human story. The authenticity of Ford’s depictions of The Great Depression allow for greater human connection for the viewer. The depiction of the total collapse of the old America resonated with the 1940 audience who, while firmly in the anxieties of World War II, experienced the change of America firsthand. The war brought about films that dove into existential concern. Similarly, The Grapes of Wrath explores the anxieties that come from reconciling your own mortality, which mirrors the characters struggles of having everything taken away from them. The individualism of the West being eradicated by capitalist control, the economic downfall leaving millions to reconcile their fates in a new world, and the seeming collapse of society itself during the time of the film’s release all forced viewers to reconcile with an uncertain future. This future had, perhaps, nothing to do with them as a collective, as free individuals, or even as finite humans unable to escape being blown away with the sands of time.