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The Grapes of Wrath (1940) The 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath represents one of those moments in film history when everything came together: a great novel, a powerful producer (Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck), a great director working at the height of his powers (John Ford), and a singularly gifted cinematographer (Gregg Toland, ASC). When Ford tapped Toland to film The Grapes of Wrath, the cameraman had already done significant work with Frank Borzage and William Wyler, and he would go on to shoot Citizen Kane the following year. Ford once said that The Grapes of Wrath was a beautifully photographed movie with nothing beautiful in it to shoot, and his assessment gets at the heart of the movie's complexity.
Today the film seems most remarkable for the way its unified style encompasses a range of strong emotions; the tone veers from pathos to anger to comedy, and to profound tragedy. Like Steinbeck's novel, the picture is both political and personal, illustrating its unabashedly liberal viewpoint with characters and situations that move the drama away from the didactic while still retaining Steinbeck's fervor. (Despite the film's subtlety, its political content was incendiary enough to inspire an FBI investigation of Ford; the novel's publication led to a similar investigation of Steinbeck.)
Although the picture is now 64 years old, the only scene that dates poorly is the incongruous, uplifting ending added by Zanuck in an attempt to dilute the harshness of the story. That effort fails, however, because the force of Ford and Toland's bleak vision is so relentless that it overpowers the final, perfunctory attempt at comforting the audience. Steinbeck once remarked that the film was even harsher than his book in its portrayal of the Joad family's socioeconomic situation, and there are night interiors and exteriors in this movie as dark as anything seen before or since in a Hollywood picture.
Toland's cinematography is astonishingly broad in scope, containing moments of great visual lyricism as well as stark images of the unforgiving landscape through which the Joads must travel. Because one of Ford's goals was to make the picture feel almost like a documentary, Toland's visuals are far subtler than the ones he created for Citizen Kane. However, close examination reveals that every shot is meticulously lit and composed, and it clearly took many hours of hard work to arrive at such an "effortless" appearance.
Released as part of Fox's Studio Classics line, this DVD represents a marked improvement over previous home-video editions and boasts a sharp transfer that takes advantage of the studio's recent restoration of the film. The original camera negative of The Grapes of Wrath no longer exists, but an incomplete nitrate composite dupe negative from the Museum of Modern Art in New York and a composite fine-grain master positive belonging to Fox were used to create new archival film elements. This two-sided disc includes a brief demonstration comparing the new print to a 1993 transfer.
Like many DVDs in the Studio Classics series, this disc has a number of informative supplements. The first side of the DVD contains an audio commentary by film critic Joseph McBride and Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillinglaw that provides a thorough historical and aesthetic analysis. McBride comments eloquently on the combination of documentary realism and carefully constructed artifice in Toland's cinematography, noting that the cameraman worked largely on studio sets where "realism" had to be built from scratch. Another interesting supplement is a prologue filmed for the movie's U.K. release in which the historical context of the Great Depression is described for British audiences.
Supplements on the second side of the disc include the film's bombastic theatrical trailer, which emphasizes Zanuck's role in the production, and an entertaining A&E Biography about the legendary producer. Especially fascinating is a collection of Fox Movietone newsreels from the Depression era. The shorts are a testament to the authenticity of Ford and Toland's work, which closely resembles many of the documentary images of both the landscape and the people set against it. The final Movietone clip contains footage of the Academy Awards ceremony (where The Grapes of Wrath was honored with two awards), and a speech by President Franklin D. Roosevelt, in which he angrily denounces foreign restrictions on the importation of American films. - Jim Hemphill Page 1 |
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