THERE GRAPES OF WRATH

New Zealand Listener, Volume 3, Issue 67, 4 October 1940, Page 12

THERE GRAPES OF WRATH

(20th Century Fox) OLLYWOOD begins to show H signs of realising that gold is not all that glitters. Used with a technical brilliance that often seems perfect, the camera has created a world of people who move on screens and of. people who look at them. Accidentally, it has occasionally picked upon a segment of real life. When it has, some have noticed; most have not. The screen has been our dreamworld and we have slumbered peacefully through all the attractive myths it has raised before us. But lately, it seems, Hollywood has been admiring with envy the best-seller sales figures of books like those written by John Steinbeck. Steinbeck has his ear to the ground. He has sensed the movements in it, heard the rustlings, and felt its upheavings as something buried strives to break the crust. And the books he has written about his findings have been read. Very well, Hollywood has said, if people read these books they will go to see them in pictures. Presto! Here are the pictures! Anyone who wishes, out of admiration for the work of John Ford,.as director of "The Grapes of Wrath," to suggest that Hollywood has a conscience after all, will please observe the introductory captions to the picture. In the art and literature of America during the last twenty years it has been impossible to escape a realisation of trouble boiling the surface. Hollywood is just learning about it. In fact, Hollywood has learned so little about it that the plight of the dust-bowl " Okies " seems to them to be the result of "natural calamities and economic forces over which there is no control.". No doubt the New Deal has been regarded as a similarly Godsent trial. And Hollywood has missed in the end of the picture just as it has misfired at the beginning. Steinbeck ended his book with a last careful touch of hopeless tragedy. This was too much for Hollywood. "The Grapes of Wrath" ends with a splendidly photographed attempt to suggest that happiness for the straying family is just around the corner where the golden lights glow. It is an artful piece of work, and will satisfy. anyone who has not read the book; but for those who know Steinbeck it will ring pretty hollow. So much for Hollywood. The picture itself, between those false ends, is a magnificent justification of the camera as a documentary force. Until the end, the book has been followed closely. Readers who remember it well (and who does not?) will be able to study as the picture unfolds exactly how it has been concertinaed into the running time-which is well over the usual limit. It is clever condensation. The photography is in tune with the mood of the picture and the people in it.

The people are in tune with the mood of the book. It is a great picture, in spite of Hollywood. These farmers in the Oklahoma Dustbowl have been driven from farms stripped of richness by the greedy cotton plant. It is "uneconomic" for them to carry on as share-croppers. Their mortgages are foreclosed, caterpillar tractors push past and through their homes. Attracted by posters offering

work, they load up their " jalopies" and rumble west to California. Here they find that the owners of the fruit orchards have taken advantage of the surfeit of labour to cut wages. They starve and their children with them. The law becomes for them a baton in the hands of a bully. Justice is changed to a blow on the head or swift fire and murder in the

night. They hate and they are hated. That is all the story. To offset Hollywood’s incurable passion for heroes and headlines, I do not trouble with the names of the cast. Director Ford has selected his types well and used them carefully. The Hays Office has kept out much of Steinbeck’s folksy language. The people who speak it remain. With the sound of guns and the sighs of refugee-ridden Europe now so loud in our ears, it may seem that this picture of a small part of the world is irrelevant. Steinbeck did not mean it to be so. He pictured just one group of people suffering for the privilege of standing upright on two legs; but he spoke for all suffering humanity. And in case there are any who still feel any doubts that the picture can show them anything, it can be said that "The Grapes of Wrath" could, and should, be shown with equal effect in church or doss-house-minus, of course, the beginning and the end. FOUR WIVES (Warners) In "Four Daughters" the director managed very cleverly to keep audiences interested while four apparently normal, small-town girls known as the Lemp sisters dealt with the problem, each in her own way, of getting married. It seemed real enough at the time and it was certainly entertaining. But there had to be a sequel. "Four Wives" deals with the matrimonial careers of the Lemp girls (Priscilla, Lola and Rosemary Lane, and Gale Page) and after seeing it one comes to the reluctant conclusion that married women are not half as interesting — on the screen anyway-as maidens. There just isn’t enough dramatic or comedy (Continued on next page)

FILM REVIEWS (Continued from previous page) material in the subject to keep the picture going for half the time it actually runs. There is only one basic situation having babies-and the clinical experiences of the Lemp sisters comprise almost the whole of a long and dull film. All the time-honoured variations on the theme of motherhood are put to work: one sister wants a baby but finds she can never have one; the village gossip, makes a mistake and spreads the wrong rumour; another sister adopts a child only to find herself very soon with twins of her own; and a third sister (whose husband committed suicide in "Four Daughters") complicates matters by going neurotic when she learns that she is to have a posthumous baby. All this maternity in one picture is bad enough; but I cannot remember having seen a production in which the mood was more hopelessly mixed. One minute it is utter burlesque and the next it is trying to be starkly tragic and almost supernatural in order to put over the theme of Priscilla Lane’s neurosis and cure. Claude Rains and May Robson are in the cast again; but John Garfield, who made such an impression as Priscilla’s embittered, suiciding "husband in "Four Daughters," appears now only in the spirit in order to haunt his wife. By his absence he makes plain what an enormous debt the success of the early picture owed to him. We now view with some apprehension the prospect of another sequel entitled "Four Mothers," followed in due course, no doubt, by "Four Grandmothers," "Four Great-grandfathers," and "Fortyfour Great-grandchildren." THE MAN FROM DAKOTA (M.-G.-M.) ' As somebody else has probably said already, Hollywood is looking very down in the South these days, thanks mainly to the influence of "Gone With the Wind" (by the way, when is that film coming here?). The Hollywood atmosphere for more than a year past has been thick with old Southern colonels, mint juleps, darkies, crinolines, and civil strife. The latest outbreak of North-and-South disease occurs in "The Man from Dakota," which gives Wallace Beery his favourite opportunity to act the hard-boiled egg with a soft centre. He is a Northern sergeant who escapes from a Confederate prison camp in company with Lieutenant John Howard and picks up Delores del Rio on the way. Sergeant Beery, as usual, cultivates the impression that he is interested solely in what happens to Sergeant Beery, but we all know that, .beneath that tattered blue uniform, there beats the usual Beery heart of gold; and sure enough the film does not close without an act of redeeming heroism in which the gallant Sergeant risks his hide to save the lovers and the Southern Army. However, this old formula is embelfished with so many reckless improba-

bilities and with so much wild adventure, and Beery himself is so wholeheartedly tough, that the show can be confidently recommended to those pic-ture-goers who are prepared to take their hard-boiled egg with a large. pinch of salt. TURNABOUT (Hal Roach-United Artists) For those who remember " Topper," and Roland Young’s hilarious acting of the Thorne Smith comedy piece, "Turn-

about" will be a disappointment. For those who don’t, it will be what the advertising puffs call "novel entertainment." Carole Landis is the wife who becomes her husband, and John Hubbard the husband who becomes his wife. The laughs that follow are laughs at the situation. The direction strains at the jokes, and the cast strains at a task that has been beyond it. "Topper" fans will have pangs of regret that such a chance to revive their humour has been missed. The rest will probably

guess that something better might have happened but didn’t; although what has happened isn’t bad. THE CROOKED ROAD (Republic) Strong-jawed, steely-eyed Edmund Lowe plays the familiar part of a man innocently convicted of various crimes, who escapes and wreaks vengeance years later. Irene Harvey is the girl who thinks he’s wonderful; Henry Wilcoxon the lawyer who catches Mr. Lowe out and then saves him from the chair.