By Frank S. Nugent
In the vast library where the celluloid literature of the screen is stored there is one small, uncrowded shelf devoted to the cinema's masterworks, to those films which by dignity of theme and excellence of treatment seem to be of enduring artistry, seem destined to be recalled not merely at the end of their particular year but whenever great motion pictures are mentioned. To that shelf of screen classics Twentieth Century Fox yesterday added its version of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath, adapted by Nunnally Johnson, directed by John Ford, and performed at the Rivoli by a cast of such uniform excellence and suitability that we should be doing its other members an injustice by saying it was "headed" by Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, and Russell Simpson.
We know the question you are asking, have been asking since the book was acquired for filming: does the picture follow the novel, how closely, and how well? The answer is that it has followed the book; has followed it closely, but not with blind, undiscriminating literalness; has followed it so well that no one who has read and admired it should complain of the manner of its screen telling. Steinbeck's language, which some found too shocking for tender eyes, has been cleaned up, but has not been toned so high as to make its people sound other than as they are. Some phases of his saga have been skimped and some omitted; the book's ending has been dropped; the sequence of events and of speeches has been subtly altered.
The changes sound more serious than they are, seem more radical than they are. For none of them has blurred the clarity of Steinbeck's word-picture of the people of the Dust Bowl. None of them has rephrased, in softer terms, his matchless description of the Joad family's trek from Oklahoma to California to find the promised land where work was plenty, wages were high, and folk could live in little white houses beside an orange grove. None of them has blunted the fine indignation or diluted the bitterness of his indictment of the cruel deception by which an empty stewpot was substituted for the pot of gold at the rainbow's end. And none of them has—as most of us feared it might—sent the film off on a witch-hunt, let it pretend there had just been a misunderstanding, made it end on the sunrise of a new and brighter day.
Steinbeck's story might have been exaggeration; at least some will take comfort in thinking so. But if only half of it were true, that half still should constitute a tragedy of modern America, a bitter chapter of national history that has not yet been closed, that has, as yet, no happy ending, that has thus far produced but two good things: a great American novel (if it is truly a novel) and a great American motion picture.
Its greatness as a picture lies in many things, not all of them readily reducible to words. It is difficult, for example, to discuss John Ford's direction, except in pictorial terms. His employment of camera is reportage and editorial and dramatization by turns or all in one. Steinbeck described the Dust Bowl and its farmers, used page on page to do it. Ford's cameras turn off a white-striped highway, follow Tom Joad scuffling through the dust to the empty farmhouse, see through Muley's eyes the pain of surrendering the land and the hopelessness of trying to resist the tractors. A swift sequence or two, and all that Steinbeck said has been said and burned indelibly into memory by a director, a camera, and a cast.
Or follow the Joads in their piled-up, rattling, wheezing truck along Highway 66, and let the Russian realists match if they can that Ford shot through the windshield, with three tired faces reflected in it and the desert through it. Or the covered wagon's arrival at the first of a series of Hoovervilles, with a litter of humans and dogs and crates in its path, and the eloquence of their mute testimony to poverty and disillusion and the degradation of the human spirit. We could mention a score of others, but they would mean no more unless you, too, had seen the picture. Direction, when it is as brilliant as Mr. Ford's has been, is easy to recognize, but impossible to describe.
It's simpler to talk about the players and the Nunnally Johnson script. There may be a few words of dialogue that Steinbeck has not written, but Mr. Johnson almost invariably has complimented him by going to the book for his lines. A sentence from one chapter is made to serve a later sequence; sometimes Ma Joad is saying things the preacher originally said; sometimes Tom is borrowing Ma's lines. But they fit and they ring true, and that applies, as well, to Mr. Johnson's reshuffling of the Steinbeck sequences, his coming to the end of the saga before Steinbeck was willing to punch out the final period.
And if all this seems strange for Hollywood—all this fidelity to a book's spirit, this resoluteness of approach to a dangerous (and, in California, an especially dangerous) topic—still stranger has been the almost incredible rightness of the film's casting, the utter believability of some of Hollywood's most typical people in untypical roles. Henry Fonda's Tom Joad is precisely the hot-tempered, resolute, saturnine chap Mr. Steinbeck had in mind. Jane Darwell's Ma is exactly the family head we pictured as we read the book. Charles Grapewin's Grampa cannot be quite the "heller" we met in the novel: the antiprofanity dictums bothered him more than the rest of them, but Mr. Grapewin's Gramp is still quite an old boy.
We could go on with this talk of the players, but it would become repetitious, for there are too many of them, and too many are perfect in their parts. What we've been trying to say is that The Grapes of Wrath is just about as good as any picture has a right to be; if it were any better, we just wouldn't believe our eyes.
THE GRAPES OF WRATH (MOVIE)
Directed by John Ford; written by Nunnally Johnson, based on the novel by John Steinbeck; cinematographer, Gregg Toland; edited by Robert Simpson; music by Alfred Newman; art designers, Richard Day and Mark Lee Kirk; produced by Darryl F. Zanuck; released by Twentieth Century Fox. Black and white. Running time: 129 minutes.
With: Henry Fonda (Tom Joad), Jane Darwell (Ma Joad), John Carradine (Casy), Charley Grapewin (Grampa), Dorris Bowdon (Rosasharn), Russell Simpson (Pa Joad), O. Z. Whitehead (Al), John Qualen (Muley), Eddie Quillan (Connie), and Zeffie Tilbury (Granma).