A Film Canon

 

 

The bleakest product of the studio system to date, The Grapes Of Wrath retains all the anguish, urgency and solemnity of Steinbeck's original, if omitting some of its more confronting scenes. Although Ford does justice to the novel's wealth of religious allusion, as well as its fusion of socialism with American egalitarianism, his specifically cinematic innovation is his flattening of middle America, and of the entire journey that takes place across it. To this end, he collaborates with cinematographer Gregg Toland, the pioneer of deep-focus, to create a landscape that is peculiarly devoid of depth, as evinced in the impressionistic brevity of many of the takes, the preponderance of darkness, and, above all, an alternation of crowded, claustrophobic topoi with a starkness that imbues real settings with the unreadable anonymity of a decontextualised set. Most basically, this suggests that the mythos of western expansion has been replaced by the expansion of class consciousness, and that the landscape has been relocated to the stoic, weatherbeaten faces of its inhabitants, destined to live on only in their collective memories. However, the combination of this flatness with a narrative predicated on movement makes for a dislocation of subjectivity that seems to go beyond the specificities of the Dust Bowl crisis, and is encapsulated in the continual motifs of indeterminate, endless wandering, all of which centre on protagonist Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) and the indeterminacy of his own thoughts and insights. At some level, this is a defence mechanism against their specific political implications, but it also speaks to a world in which all established structure is on the verge of collapse, and America has been transformed into a giant no-man's-land, its connective highway tissue stripped of all co-ordinates other than opaque displays of power.