Directed by John Ford. 129 mins.
Worth my time? Yes. (Seen at AMC Promenade 16, Woodland Hills)
Grapes was playing at the AMC for no reason in particular, so I took the chance to do some catching up with Mr. Ford’s filmography. This version of Steinbeck’s story of mass migration during the Dust Bowl hasn’t aged perfectly. Some scenes are overly sentimental (at least to my 21st-century sensibilities), and the film makes no mention of how the New Deal paid landowners and companies not to use their farm, resulting in the increase in food prices and countless sharecroppers having no land to work. Political quibbles aside, Grapes remains a powerful film more than 70 years after it premiered. I can only imagine how much of a slug to the gut it to audiences who actually lived through the events it depicted just a few years prior.
Henry Fonda and John Carradine’s performances are the highlights of a great ensemble cast, but, as usual, the star is Ford’s camera work. Motherfucker was using wide-angle shots when nobody was even thinking of doing it. His trick of filling much of the frame with skies full of wispy, backlit clouds gets predictable, but it’s still an effective device.
Aside: The opening and closing music is distractingly cheery for such a grim film. What gives?
(Seen on 2014-03-16, written on 2014-03-21)
