jentleman film journal.

An Unexpected Feeling

Or, The AFI List Project #23: The Grapes of Wrath

It is a mystery to me how The Grapes of Wrath could have ended up in the top 25 of any list purporting to be a comprehensive survey of great films (unless, perhaps, the title of that list was ‘Blatantly Political Movies About Hicks Driving Around in Jalopies’). From technical and aesthetic points of view, I can find almost nothing to recommend it. The cinematography is unremarkable, the direction interminably slow, and the writing appalling; the first half of the film consists almost entirely of shots of the Joad car crawling across the landscape and of highway route signs, and its communist sympathies are not just unmistakable but also aggressive. Impassioned performances from Henry Fonda and eventual Best Supporting Actress Oscar winner Jane Darwell were the lone highlights. Frankly, the movie is boring. I spent the first hour-and-a-half (in other words, three quarters of the total running time) alternating between trying to figure out why I was supposed to like it and wanting it to come a merciful, long-overdue end.

And yet… And yet… there was something…

Well, anyway, before we get to that, let me offer a brief summary of the film so that people at least have some idea of what I’m talking about. As readers of the Steinbeck novel upon which it is based will know, The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the hard-pressed Joad family after they are forced to leave their tenant farm in the Dust Bowl and travel west in search of work. Henry Fonda plays the youthful Tom Joad, who gets out of prison just in time to join his family on their trip to California. The trip is a veritable Oregon Trail, including the deaths of family members, transportation troubles, and moral conundrums about whether or not to feed starving children. Once they get to California, however, they find that their troubles have only just begun, as they are confronted with low wages, strike-breaking businessmen, and hostile locals who want nothing so much as the disappearance of all the ‘Oakies’ who have suddenly emerged from the east.

In its entirety, the movie is more or less a dissertation on why capitalism is bad, starting from the opening displacement of the Joads (accompanied by a heartfelt monologue by one character about how the land they lived on was theirs by dint of having lived on it, worked on it, and died on it) and culminating in their arrival at what it is for all intents and purposes a communist fairyland in California (which in the end they are also forced to leave). Along the way, a former companion is made into a sort of proletarian martyr, and Tom eventually decides to follow his lead and become the prophet of his message.

I was, surprisingly, not disturbed too much by the all-too-obvious politics of the film, despite the fact that political art of any variety is one of the few things that gets me foaming at the mouth. Perhaps my relative indifference arose from how blatant those politics were; perhaps it came about because for most of the movie I was so disinterested in it anyway. What did it matter to me if the Joads thought they should become communists?

And then, around when the Joad jalopy pulled into that communist fairyland that would represent their all-too-brief respite from the difficulties that had haunted them from the time of Tom’s initial return to his ancestral home, something bizarre and altogether unexpected happened. All of a sudden, I became aware that I inexplicably wanted the Joads to pull through all right. I wanted Tom to escape justice and realize himself; I wanted Ma and Pa Joad to endure; I wanted Rose of Sharon to have her baby and learn to be happy again. I discovered, in other words, that over the course of the first three-quarters of the movie I had come to care about the characters, despite how different they were from me, despite the shameless politicking that the film represented.

Might this be representative of one of the most important characteristics of film as an art form? There are, after all, reasons beyond competence that artists choose different mediums, and what a film is capable of is different from what a novel or a poem or a painting is capable of. Like photography, film is fundamentally observational: it suggests that we look directly at something that is really happening in the moment. At the same time, it is, like a novel, a narrative form; it is meant, most of the time, to tell a story. Film teaches us to like characters, to feel compassion for them, in much the same way that we often make friends in real life: by getting to know them. It did not have to be the Joads that were at the center of The Grapes of Wrath. It might have been any such dispossessed Dust Bowl family. Like in real life, we find them to some degree randomly; that they are the ones we come to care for is neither preordained nor necessary, simply a fact. They are the ones that we come to know, and in their trials and tribulations we are able to see also (we hope) some representation of the truth of our own lives.

This shows up, incidentally, one of the main problems of The Grapes of Wrath, which is its facile and mildly offensive resort to politics as the grand revelation that Tom experiences at the end of the film. There is something beneath the politics, however – a somewhat more human resolution that has to do with suffering and endurance. I don’t think that that makes The Grapes of Wrath a great movie, but it does allow it to transcend its more obvious shortcomings.

As I look at that, one other point comes to mind, which is that this is one of the few films that really showcases the importance of acting in creating successful films. I don’t say that to take away from other great performances: there are plenty of movies that rely on virtuoso performances to carry the weight of the movie. Can you imagine what There Will Be Blood would have been without Daniel Day-Lewis, for instance? The difference is that even such movies often have much more going on than those individual performances. There Will Be Blood, for instance, is also a virtuosic piece of directing; similarly, Lawrence of Arabia would have been significantly diminished without Peter O’Toole in the title role, but the story is still epic, and the cinematography makes the desert itself a separate and vital personality. There are none of those things in The Grapes of Wrath, just Fonda and Darwell seemingly becoming the people that they are to represent. They are what make the movie watchable. In believing that they are who they play, the suffering that the characters endure, which would otherwise have been so trite and so exaggerated, becomes real. Only when it is real can we, the audience, be induced to care.

All that being said, The Grapes of Wrath did not make me into a communist, so maybe it failed on that level. And I will maintain that, in the end, it’s not much of a film, interesting only for academic reasons. But it did remind me of something very important, very valuable, about why I love the movies, and for that at least it was worth the watch.

The AFI List Project : #12, ‘The Searchers’

The Searchers, a 1956 John Ford-directed John Wayne star vehicle, is the top Western on the AFI list. I couldn’t put my finger on why – maybe the result of having inundated myself with reruns of The Lone Ranger when I was young – but this movie seemed outside the realm of how I think of Westerns as being structured and plotted. (I had the same reaction, in fact, when I watched Howard Hawks’s 1956 Red River, also starring Wayne).

The Western has always been the most heroic of American film genres, because fundamentally the Western is an exploration of what is, quite literally, the last frontier. Its subjects are men and women living in wild and semi-lawless territory, settling ahead of the inroads of American civilization and, generally, aware of their role in preparing the way for it. One character in The Searchers, reflecting on the difficulties faced by white settlers, nonetheless opines that ‘some day this country’s gonna be a fine, good place to be’ – but with the dark addition that ‘maybe it needs our bones in the ground before that time can come.’

This, I would think, is what has made the Western such an appealing genre for so many filmmakers – the situation of settlers is so extreme that its protagonists must necessarily be men of remarkable will and character to succeed, and because the reach of the law is tenuous at best they have no choice but to be the law themselves. Hence characters like the Lone Ranger, who rides around on his great white horse righting wrongs and acting the part of the hand of justice in a place where justice is remarkable and rare. Heroes thrive on the fringes of the law; in this way the Ranger is of the same ilk as Robin Hood, Rob Roy, Dirty Harry, even Batman. The West could be a sort of state of nature, where steely-eyed men with strong jaws on the side of right were nonetheless forced to take up arms and fight. With no recourse to a higher power, justice and right falls into the hands of the frontiersman, who may (or may not) prove himself a hero. In my mind, then, with the Lone Ranger the shadowy archetype left over from my youth, Westerns are about a man in the pursuit of justice, played usually by a scowling Clint Eastwood or similar with the quickest draw in town, perhaps a troubled past, and no fear to fire.

Well, I could not go so far as to say that John Wayne is not steely-eyed and strong-jawed, and in both Red River and The Searchers his characters have a great deal of the ‘Western heroism’ that I associate with the genre. Somehow, though, The Searchers is more of a character study than anything else, and where one looks for posses chasing down outlaws or large-scale battles with Indians we have for the most part only two men wandering the wilds together in a seemingly impossible quest to find a missing girl.

But I get ahead of myself. In brief, then, The Searchers opens with the return of ex-Confederate soldier Ethan Edwards to his brother’s home on the frontier. The next morning, the local militia captain (also the local reverend) comes to the home looking to enlist Ethan’s brother Aaron and Aaron’s adoptive son Martin in the brigade to ride out and find a group of Comanche Indians that have rustled some cattle. Ethan insists on going in Aaron’s place, however, and he and Martin ride out with the Rangers. As it turns out, though, the hustle was merely a ruse, and Ethan and Martin return to the homestead to discover that the Indians have burned it down, killed Aaron and his wife and son, and abducted Aaron’s two daughters. The bulk of the film concerns the two men’s five-year effort to track down the Comanche band and rescue the girls, following the various misadventures they have along the way.

There are two major action setpieces, both involving battles with the Indians, and naturally a great emphasis on the vastness and openness of the frontier. The central tension of the film, though, comes in the relationship between Ethan and Martin, and, ultimately, the question of whether Ethan – and the cowboy archetype that he embodies – can ever be reconciled to domestic life or, indeed, life in the context of civilization. When Ethan returns at the beginning of the film, we know only that he was an office in the Confederate army (and thus at home in the lawlessness of Civil War) and that after his discharge he seems to have engaged in some disreputable business – what that was is not made clear. The final battle with the Comanche might well be seen as the last assertion of the frontiersmen :  the Rangers ride in to attack, but there is a cohort of Union troops only a few miles behind, and with the arrival of their commander at the end of the battle command effectively passes out of the hands of the Ranger captain. The last shot of the film depicts the family re-entering the homestead, but Ethan, standing on the doorstep, does not go in, instead walking out onto the plains. Civilization and law are coming to the West, clearly – and The Searchers seems to suggest that that can only mean the end of the romantic era of heroic cowboys that has now passed into legend.

It is appropriate that I observed in my notes on City Lights how well Chaplin employs visual language in story-telling, because there is a strange disconnect in The Searchers between the superb craftsmanship of individual scenes and what amounts to clumsiness in the way the film deals with time. The very first scene of the movie is more richly layered in subtext and meaning than anything else I’ve seen that I can think of off the top of my head, yet Ford seems simply incapable of providing the sort of basic clues towards passage of time that most contemporary directors could put together out of the leavings of the cutting room floor. That proves to be where the film loses the most emotional impact, because though we are told that Ethan and Martin have been searching for five years it never feels like they’ve been searching for more than a month. The arduousness of their task, and their commitment to their mission, are completely lost, and those are the foundations of the movie’s drive to pathos.

I’m not saying anything at this point that has not been said before. Let me close by simply observing, then, that though dated The Searchers is a fine piece of work and well worth seeing. I almost never watch westerns – probably because Kevin Costner is the only person who makes them anymore – and most of my readers (all three of them) probably don’t either. The Searchers has made me think that that may be a mistake.

I can’t think of an appropriate Gentleman of the Day. If any reader happens to know of any great examples of a cowboy who is also a gentleman, let me know.