The Grapes of Wrath is one of those great American films based off an equally great American novel. The story of the Joad family is one of injustice and standing up for the little guy when times are tough and people with more than they probably need see no harm in dictating unfair terms to people suffering from the direst of economic catastrophes possible, an indictment of the capitalist system as the cold and impersonal thing that it is, and an angry cry from people who won’t take it much longer, hence the title that, as I have noted before, is only really explained if you’ve read the book and not if you’ve only seen the film.
But as I try not to repeat myself in these columns, why not discuss the literary adaptation at work here?
The Grapes of Wrath, in both novel and film form, is the story of the Joad family, a large and prototypical family of “Okies,” or Oklahoma farmers, displaced when they lost their family farm to a faceless bank during the Dust Bowl, all in the middle of the Great Depression. Like a lot of people in that situation, the family decided to move to California under the (as it turns out) false promise of well-paying jobs on the large farms out there. Author John Steinbeck interlaces his chapters on the Joads with shorter chapters, depicting the various people who mistreated or abused the Okies migrating West along the way, almost all of them in the name of profit, and it is in one of these short chapters that the title comes from. Again, I prefer not to repeat myself, but Steinbeck uses his long narrative to give each of the Joads something of a personality. He also depicts them doing actual work–something the film never shows–but Steinbeck was also interested in emphasizing the connection between farmers and their land, and the film either couldn’t or wouldn’t, instead focusing on the Joads as a family that finds their strength in each other even as various members of the family (plus John Carradine’s demoralized former preacher Jim Casy) disappear for one reason or another.
Quite frankly, I get why the film does that, and despite the less pessimistic tone of the film, it still packs a punch. Steinbeck’s politics were toned down for the film, but that was nothing new. Gone with the Wind was another popular novel that became a popular film, but the producers there opted to tone down the more racist elements of Margaret Mitchell’s one and only novel. And if your novel is somehow seen as racist in 1939, that’s saying something. I may say more about that when I get to Gone with the Wind for the Stacker Countdown. But knowing that the film toned down the novel doesn’t mean there aren’t questionable elements in the film even today, and the same holds true with The Grapes of Wrath. Maybe it’s more that I am better informed now than I was in 2018, but for this viewing, I caught a lot more potentially radical politics coming off this film than I did before.
I can chart most of that up to having a friend and co-worker who is a dyed-in-the-wool socialist who has, over time, been more inclined to share his political and economic beliefs with me whether I want him to or not. I know now, but I doubt I did in 2018, that there is a difference between a liberal and a leftist. Liberals, apparently, still believe in capitalism. And maybe it’s just the fact that I have seen a lot of stuff go down in my country in the past five years, the sorts of things that have increased my interest in political and economic lines of thought, such that I see things about this film that I never noticed before. For example, there’s a short scene in the film where one of the few decent land-owners warns the Joads that a dance at the Department of Agriculture-run camp will be attacked by locals in an attempt to allow local law enforcement to come in, bust heads, and cause trouble. There’s mention of “reds,” but Tom Joad (Henry Fonda in a role he was born to play) doesn’t even know what a “red” is. That’s toned down from Steinbeck’s novel where a landowner basically says a “red” is any worker who demands thirty cents an hour when the offer is twenty-five. So, basically, anyone who wants to make things better for workers at the expense of the rich landowners is a communist, and let’s face it, accusations of communism and socialism by some very prominent people in business and especially politics hasn’t exactly been something that only happened during the Great Depression. If I were to be so bold, I might assume that calling someone a “red” back then is about the same as saying someone is “woke” now.
Factor in as well that the only good cop in the entire state of California that the Joads meet is another transplanted Okie, and even he just basically warns them to get their truck out of his town before sundown before bad things happen. I can safely say that the “All Cops Are Bad” slogan was not something I knew in 2018, but I’ve heard it quite a bit since then, and regardless of whether or not I agree with it, I think it is safe to say John Steinbeck might have. The cops in this story exist only to cause grief or commit violence against the poor on behalf of the rich, and I am sure there are plenty of people who would agree with that statement today.
Still, this isn’t just about softening Steinbeck’s politics through adaptation. Let’s face it: 20th Century Fox was not going to allow someone to put a full-throated endorsement of socialism into a film they were producing to make a profit. It’s about boiling down a very long novel into a story that will fit into two hours or so of screentime. That sort of thing happens. The film version of Gone with the Wind suggests Scarlett O’Hara only had one child. In the novel, she has three, two by her first husband. Steinbeck’s own work shows the same sort of thing. The excellent East of Eden was likewise a very thick book with a lot of characters and deep ideas, but the film only really adapted the last 15 or so chapters. That’s going to happen when something is translated from one medium to another, and as far as I know, John Steinbeck had no real complaints about either film. True, I haven’t really looked, but at the very least, Wikipedia lists no complaints from Steinbeck on The Grapes of Wrath‘s cinematic adaptation.
Quite frankly, I think that’s fine. John Ford knows how to tell a good visual story, and the Joad family is a big one. By focusing mostly on Tom and Ma Joad (Jane Darwell), with a bit of attention given to Jim Casy, the emphasis goes onto the family by focusing on the two people who seem, through sheer force of will, to be keeping everyone together. Tom’s the conscience while Ma is the heart. When Pa Joad (Russell Simpson) isn’t sure he can keep going at the end of the film, it’s Ma who who bucks up his spirits. When Tom can’t stay because he went and killed a man (for the second time, and neither of them premeditated), he can say he’ll be there in spirit, like when there’s a cop beating up a guy. He’ll be there in the dark as that guy who observes and perhaps can bring justice when needed. The rest of the family gets scant screentime, and sometimes for very understandable reasons given this came out in 1940 and the Hays Code was very much a thing. We don’t hear much of Uncle John’s (Frank Darien) drinking or whoring, but likewise, we hear nothing about how guilty he feels over the death of a young wife many years earlier. Rosasharn (Dorris Bowdon) is pregnant (but not really showing as near as I can make out), and the fate of that pregnancy is unrevealed in the film while the novel tells the reader the baby would be stillborn and Rosasharn would offer her lactation to a dying old man in a barn.
I remember that last part very well because, during my college years, I had a professor who liked to talk about a stage adaptation, then recent, that got the blessing of the Steinbeck estate to cast a Black man as the dying old man for that scene.
But then there is likewise the children Ruthie and Winfield (Shirley Mills and Darryl Hickman), here basically a pair of precocious children while the novel depicts Ruthie as something of a bratty troublemaker and Winfield as a wild kid. Tom’s younger brothers Noah (Frank Sully) and Al (O.Z. Whitehead) are basically there, and Noah, described a simple-minded in the novel possibly due to a childhood accident, just disappears at one point. In the novel, he opts to live by a river and won’t be talked out of it. Here, the last the audience sees of him is he’s playing with a crude toy boat in the river the family has stopped at to rest a bit. Al in the book is into cars and women, like a lot of sixteen year olds, and announces an engagement at the end. In the film, he tries to pick up some girls at a dance, and then has one really eager-looking one basically bounce over to him. I don’t think she even had a name. Does it matter that this level of detail is absent from the film?
I would actually say no, and to that end, I would use a different example: Akira. I have seen the anime film and read the original manga, and the manga was six thick volumes that told an epic story that prominently featured the title character. In the film, Akira himself doesn’t appear at all until the very end to put a stop to Tetsuo’s rampage. Or something. It’s a complicated story. Regardless, important characters from the manga get little better than brief cameos, sometimes just to die, in the film. And yet, I have no issue with the changes made, and not simply because I am not that big an Akira fan. No, the reason is simple: the manga’s creator, Katsuhiro Otomo, co-wrote and directed the film. That means that he was consciously aware of how the story would change from one medium to the next and boiled down his thick epic to what it became in the film. At essence, Akira tells the same basic story in different mediums.
And that is more or less how I see The Grapes of Wrath. John Ford’s film couldn’t quite capture the essence of the land and its connection to the people, and there’s no way the studio wouldn’t have blunted Steinbeck’s politics or tried to give the film a more optimistic ending. But it’s still the story of the Joads, a hard-working and proud family that suffered for no good reason beyond the greed of people they never met who saw the Joads and thousands of people like them as disposable. When that happens, maybe there is a need for a Tom Joad to be eternally watching things from the dark.
NEXT: Speaking of films from the 40s with less-than-happy endings, up next is my Grandpop’s favorite film of all time (according to my dad): 1941’s The Maltese Falcon.
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