The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath is a Western without gun fights.
Grade: A
John Ford was famous for making Westerns but he was too good at making them to think that he could only find pioneers in Monument Valley where he made Stagecoach in 1939 and turned John Wayne into the heroic frontiersman.
The next year, 1940, Ford put John Steinbeck’s novel The Grapes of Wrath on the screen, and he started the story of the migrant farmer family the Joads as he did the story of Stagecoach and many of his other Westerns. There’s a wide shot of a country road. The sun’s burning white and bright on the horizon. A lone figure walks out of the horizon and down the road toward you. That figure is Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returning to his family’s farm in Oklahoma after he’s paroled from jail, and he’s not riding a horse but he’s still galloping out of the horizon towards you like one of Wayne’s noble cowboys.
Tom arrives at a roadside diner and asks a truck driver for a lift. The driver points at a sticker that says no riders allowed, and Tom says: “A good guy don’t pay no attention to what some heel makes him stick on his truck.” A hero comes out of the horizon and he follows his own rules. The Grapes of Wrath opens just like a Western.
There are enough shared threads between the Joads and the American settlers who filled Ford’s Westerns to weave a carpet from. The Joads set out for California after losing their farm. They’re heading West and to the land Pa Joad calls “the land of milk and honey.” They travel in a large truck that’s the modern descendant of the Western stagecoach. The jalopy’s a metal hulk of an Ark carrying three generations of Joads and everything they own and it pushes and pushes across the horizons of Ford’s wide shots that cut across Route 66, deserts and then through 20th century American towns.
The Joads are always looking off camera towards that horizon they’re driving towards. Tom’s brother Ale at one point seems to doubt if they’ll make it. “People have done it,” Tom says. “If they could we could.” The Joads keep going just like the heroes of Stagecoach who pressed on through country swarming with murderous Apache and all Ford’s other stubborn frontier heroes.
Except the Joads are living in Depression-era America not frontier-era America. Their adversaries aren’t Apache, bandits or gunslingers and they can’t pull guns on anyone who tries to stop them getting to their “land of milk and honey.” Their neighbour Muley tells Tom how he was kicked off his farm just like the Joads were. A corporate functionary came to his farm and told him to get off. Muley demanded to know who’s kicking him off his land and who he should point a gun at. The exasperated middleman tries to explain that the decision was made by the company, who’s run by the president, who’s run by the bank, who’s run by the bank manager, who’s run by someone in the East. “Then who do we shoot?” Muley asks. “Brother I don’t know,” the middleman tells him. “If I did, I’d tell you.” Unlike Ford’s other pioneers, the Joads can’t fight back against the rich and the powerful who get in their way. All they can do is keep pushing on.
They do and it makes their story as much a thrilling odyssey as any ride across the frontier fighting Apache as John Wayne ever had. The Grapes of Wrath is a Western without gun fights.