DVD Retro Rec: The Grapes of Wrath Still Resonates For a New "I'll Be There" Generation

The most familiar and popular title in Fox's massive new Ford at Fox collection is almost certainly The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford's moving 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's gut-punching and humane American epic. Like the Pulitzer-winning novel, in its day Ford's odyssey of displaced Dust Bowl "Okies" was hailed as a triumph of poetic realism, and became a touchstone for generations of moviegoers for whom the Great Depression left deep and irreversible scars.

Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson softened Steinbeck's relentless bleakness but not his ear for language or his ferocious compassion. And there's no question that the book's heartbreaking final scene, depicting one of the most compassionate and selfless affirmations of human decency you'll find anywhere, broke a half-dozen too many taboos to come within a Texas mile of a 1940 movie screen.

Nonetheless, Johnson, Ford, the superb ensemble cast headlined by Henry Fonda, and cinematographer Gregg Toland (through beautiful black-and-white imagery) captured the tone and spirit of their source while providing some of the most virtuosic work of their careers.

Fonda is Tom Joad, who after four years in the state penitentiary (for manslaughter) returns to his Oklahoma farm home and finds that everything has changed. The farm has been wiped out, physically and financially, by forces he cannot comprehend. Fonda inhabits Tom with barely restrained anger, and his transformation into a man representing the steel-spined dignity of "the people" is hard won through scenes that are machine-tooled to be affecting but remain no less effective because of it.

John Carradine's Casy, the fallen preacher on a spiritual quest to "explore the wilderness" of human earthiness, mentors Tom after doomed Muley (John Qualen) reveals that the Joad family was forced to join the thousands of migrants leaving their devastated lands on a brutal trek toward the uncertain promised land of California. The undauntable matriarch, Ma Joad (Oscar-winner Jane Darwell), fights to hold the family together in spite of privation, violence, and simple human frailty they encounter along the way. "Can't wipe us out. Can't lick us. We'll go on forever," she says.

Ford was a confluence of contradictions, both the hard-bitten conservative and the natural romantic whom critic Andrew Sarris called "the supreme American film poet of homecomings and leave-takings, of last stands and lost causes." The Grapes of Wrath, an emotional uppercut extolling each of those descriptors, earned Ford the Oscar for Best Director. Occasionally it tries too hard to win us over by its righteousness, but this intimate tale of the heroic struggling poor speaks with eloquence on the strength and adaptability of family unity in the grip of hard times, injustice and oppressive, faceless entities that uproot families and command destruction from afar for the sake of "a piece of paper."

Fonda's Tom Joad gave a face to "the little guy" who spoke to an America in danger of losing its soul. "Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, I'll be there," he famously says. "Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be in the way guys yell when they're mad -- I'll be in the way kids laugh when they're hungry an' they know supper's ready. An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build -- I'll be there, too."

Today, with Hurricane Katrina in our recent memory and a nation-defining presidential election on its way, here's a movie that still asserts its relevance. Through that scene alone, it practically defines "timeless" as it uploads a direct connection to the latest "I'll be there" generation.

In 1998 the American Film Institute selected the best American films of all time by a vote of 1,500 industry experts. In the resulting CBS TV special, AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Movies, The Grapes of Wrath ranked #21, between One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and 2001: A Space Odyssey. In a 2005 follow-up, AFI's 100 Years ... 100 Cheers: America's Most Inspiring Movies, the film took 7th position. In 2007's tenth anniversary edition of 100 Years ... 100 Movies, it holds steady at #23. Currently it boasts a 100% "Fresh" rating at Rotten Tomatoes.

One of the first movies included in the National Film Registry, it proves that a Hollywood film can be both socially engaged and a work of lasting, entertaining art.

About the DVD

Fox's new Ford at Fox edition of The Grapes of Wrath is identical to the 2004 Studio Classics edition. All the same, it delivers a sterling print that restores Toland's photography to its deep, documentary-like beauty. The audio comes in clean, clear options of DD 2.0 stereo and the original monaural. It's now available in the complete Ford at Fox boxed set or as part of the smaller The Essential John Ford mini-collection, and individually as a single disc.

The big extra is the spirited commentary track by Ford scholar Joseph McBride and Steinbeck expert Susan Shillinglaw. Their thorough backgrounder covers the film and everyone involved, as well as the sometimes bitter controversies surrounding the novel's content and themes. Both are well-spoken and engaging, making for an insightful track that offers more than just bullet-point factoids.

Also here are the film's U.K. prologue (available as a branching option, these text cards about the Dust Bowl gave foreign audiences, and now modern Americans, some context), A&E Biography's hour on mogul producer Darryl F. Zanuck, three drought reports from 1934 as reported by Movietone News (plus outtakes from them), and a period report showing FDR "Lauding Motion Pictures" at the Academy Awards banquet with Jane Darwell receiving her gold statue. The theatrical trailer, a Still Gallery and a Restoration Comparison round out the extras.

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