STATE THEATRE

Wairarapa Times-Age, 9 November 1940, Page 2

STATE THEATRE

“THE GRAPES OF WRATH.” It was good news for Steinbeck readers to hear that John Ford was to direct “The Grapes of Wrath,” which will be shown tonight at the State Theatre. Ford has an uncanny knack both for character films and for portraying the out-of-doors as though it really had something to do with the people in the story. He did it memorably in “The Informer” and in “Stage Coach,” and now, in a story of genuine topical importance, he has excelled his own high standards. “The Grapes of Wrath,” will act as a measuring stick for dramatic films for a long time to come. It is a story of migrant workers in America, driven out of the Oklahoma dust-bowl by starved soil, fit only to be cropped by mass-production methods, and yet deteriorating even more rapidly because of those methods. The Ford family is typical of hundreds of other “Okie” families, who are attracted by promises of work and food to make the long trek to California. After trials and difficulties that would have broken the spirit of less resourceful people, they arrived in the promised land, only to find that, in competition with thousands of their kind, pay for fruit-pickers is not sufficient for the barest needs of food and shelter. Worse still, unscrupulous fruit companies are not above making capital out of the plight of the migrant workers, and State and County police authority is! used to keep them in a proper state of dejection—though their efforts do, ill fact, bring peaceful folk to the verge of revolt. Yet, for all its sombre theme, “The Grapes of Wrath” is by no means a sombre film. Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), Ma (Jane Darwell), Casy (John Carradine) and all the rest of these people are so real and so vital that it almost seems as though a piece of life had been placed on the screen, with all the humour and all the pathos of reality. The little family jokes, the robust humour and the large share of tragedy have been handled simply and sympathetically. Looking at it either as entertainment or as a social document, most of the audience will feel the better for having seen it. John Ford, with extraordinarily able assistance from every member of the cast, has, as it were, squeezed out the quint-essence of simple people, toughened by adversity to something approaching invincibility. He has put on the screen not only a fine piece of dramatic entertainment, but a message that cannot be lost to anyone at such a time as the present. (