TOBACCO ROAD

New Zealand Listener, Volume 5, Issue 123, 31 October 1941, Page 16

TOBACCO ROAD

(20th Century Fox)

|1OW in its eighth year on Broadway, Tobacco Road is claimed to be the longest-running play in stage history. The reason is, however, by no means ap-

parent from the film version. Like The Long Voyage Home, this is a John Ford production, and again it is both interesting and disappointing, but in this case with the emphasis a good deal more on the latter adjective. In spite of several of the original stage cast, the sum of 200,000 dollars expended on the script, and the benefit of Ford’s direction, the film certainly bears none of the signs of record longevity or even of extended seasons. The cause, I imagine, is to be found in the fact that the screen is not the stage. Though I haven’t seen Jack Kirkland’s stage play nor read Erskine Caldwell’s original novel, I’ve heard enough about both to know that it was quite beyond Hollywood, even in its most daring mood, to put the full rank flavour of Tobacco Road into film. Only the success of The Grapes of Wrath under Ford’s direction could have inspired them to try; but the odds were (Continued on next page)

FILM REVIEWS (Continued from previous page) against the venture from the start. It was possible to operate on The Grapes otf Wrath and still leave enough of its guts for it to be a potent social document. With Tobacco Road the disembowelling process has just about proved fatal. Only the brilliant acting of Charley Grapewin, playing his original stage role of old Jeeter Lester, and of one or two others, and some of Ford’s directorial touches, keep a small flame of interest alive. Tobacco Road is a drama of degeneracy in the backwoods of modern Georgia, where a handful of farmers, their women and their children, inbred over generations and ‘grubbing for starvation rations in soil that is played out, lead lives worse even than those of animals-for there is some reason to believe that animals enjoy life and are healthy. With a few sidelong hints, the film vaguely suggests what the play apparently made clearthat depravity and vice are rampant, and that the moronic behaviour of most of the characters is no accident. Yet these unfortunates still cling to their land, though sloth has taken such a hold that nobody can find the energy to work it properly. To New Zealand cinema audiences (though presumably not to American theatre audiences of the past eight years) it may seem incredible that such a cancer spot could exist on the modern social structure of the U.S.A., and this feeling that the whole situation is at least slightly exaggerated is strengthened by the method of treatment to which Hollywood is committed by the screen’s canons of censorship. Unable to put the right degree of emphasis on_ sordid realism, it has placed the emphasis instead on comedy. So that, in spite of everything Ford can do to prevent itand here and there he and his cameramen do a good deal-the film develops an air of burlesque. Sentimentality replaces bitter tragedy, and a half-baked happy ending completes the air of falseness, Indeed, having passed cau the censor’s operating room and fumigating chamber, Tobacco Road emerges most ludicruously as a kind of Dad and Dave farce---rather more serious than the tustic buffoonery of Snake Gully, but still mainly farcical. What has happened to the theatre’s longest-running play was brought home to me most forcibly by the audience’s reaction when, old Jeeter Lester having asked the whereabouts of a piece of harness, he is told quite simply that "Granma’s ate it.’ They laughed like anything at that! I don’t, blame them, but it should have been obvious that this was very far from being a joke.