Critics' Corner - The Grapes of Wrath
The Grapes of Wrath won Academy Awards for Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell) and Best Director (John Ford); it was nominated for Best Picture, Actor (Henry Fonda), Film Editing, Sound Recording, and Screenplay. Fonda was the odds-on favorite to win that year, but the Academy gave the award to his close friend James Stewart, who was one of the names proposed for a supporting role in the picture (as brother Al). Stewart, who won for The Philadelphia Story (1940) told the press before the awards were announced that he had voted for Fonda. (Many have speculated that Stewart won the Oscar that year as compensation for being passed over for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington in 1939).
The movie was included in Film Daily's "ten best" list for 1940
It was named Best Film by the National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics Association. The critics' group also chose Ford as Best Director.
The Grapes of Wrath was included in the first 25 films selected by the National Film Preservation Board to be preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the first year selections were made.
The movie was ranked #7 on the American Film Institute's 2006 list of the 100 Most Inspiring Movies of All Time.
In 2007, ranked #23 on the American Film Institute list of the Greatest Movies of All Time.
The Critics' Corner: THE GRAPES OF WRATH
"If all this seems strange for Hollywood-all this fidelity to a book's spirit, this resoluteness of approach to a dangerous (and, in California, an especially dangerous) topic-still stranger has been the almost incredible rightness of the film's casting, the utter believability of some of Hollywood's most typical people in untypical roles. Henry Fonda's Tom Joad is precisely the hot-tempered, resolute, saturnine chap Mr. Steinbeck had in mind. Jane Darwell's Ma is exactly the family-head we pictured as we read the book. ... The Grapes of Wrath is just about as good as any picture has a right to be; if it were any better, we just wouldn't believe our eyes."
– Frank Nugent, New York Times, January 25, 1940
"Absorbing, tense melodrama, starkly realistic, and loaded with social and political fireworks. ... Grapes is far removed from conventional film entertainment. It tackles one phase of the American social problem in a convincing manner. It possesses an adult viewpoint and its success may lead other producers to explore the rich field of contemporary life which films long have neglected and ignored."
– John C. Flinn Sr., Variety, January 31, 1940
"It is quite a movie. ... You may forget Fonda is in the company-his performance is so tough, undeviating and simple you may think he is one of the extras, or one of the actual migrants."
– Pare Lorentz, McCall's, 1940
"It is an honest, eloquent, and challenging screen masterpiece. Great artistry has gone into its making and greater courage, for this screen tribute to the dispossessed not only has dramatized the large theme of Mr. Steinbeck's novel in enduring visual terms-it has demonstrated beyond any question that the cinema can take the raw stuff of contemporary living and mold it to a provocative photoplay pattern."
– Howard Barnes, New York Herald Tribune, 1940
"Ford's film, shot by Gregg Toland with magnificent, lyrical simplicity, captures the stark plainness of the migrants, stripped to a few possessions, left with innumerable relations and little hope."
– Matthew Hoffman, Time Out Film Guide (Penguin, 2002)
"John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath is a left-wing parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper's son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer. The message is boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity than anger or resolve. It's a message movie, but not a recruiting poster. ... Henry Fonda['s] Tom Joad is one of the great American movie characters, so pure and simple and simply there in the role that he puts it over. Fonda was an actor with the rare ability to exist on the screen without seeming to reach or try. ... I wonder if American audiences will ever again be able to understand the original impact of this material, on the page and on the screen. The centenary of Steinbeck's birth is now being observed with articles sniffing that he was not, after all, all that good, that his Nobel was undeserved, that he was of his time and has dated. But one would not want The Grapes of Wrath written differently; irony, stylistic experimentation and 'modernism' would weaken it."
– Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times, March 31, 2002
"This is one of the most important Hollywood films of the Roosevelt era."
- Georges Sadoul, Dictionary of Films
"This famous film, high on most lists of the great films of all time, seems all wrong - phony when it should ring true. Yet, because of the material, it is often moving in spite of the acting, the directing, and the pseudo-Biblical poor-people talk. In some externals, the production is as authentic as a documentary."
- Pauline Kael, 5001 Nights at the Movies
"Through Nunnally Johnson's articulate script, Ford is pleading, pleading, pleading, and in the film's last quarter he offers perhaps too optimistic a salve...Jane Darwell as Ma gives a wholly committed performance, but it is Fonda, with his cat-like walk and his deep-etched gaze, who takes on the features of an Everyman, suffering with grace and every so often lashing out against exploitation. Few Hollywood films have taken so stern a stand against the realities of social injustice."
- Peter Cowie, Eighty Years of Cinema
"The Grapes of Wrath came from the heart...Time and again, Toland adds a mood of Dorothea Land and the WPA. Ford got it right. It's hard to draw much of a distinction between his movie and Walker Evans's work on Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1941, but planned years before) - there is an epic, pictorial quality in both, and maybe in the Ford you can see the faces of actors sometimes. But he delivered the message...Sixty years later, The Grapes of Wrath still looks like an earnest and touching attempt by the film industry to honor years of national hardship and sacrifice, and Fonda's Tom Joad is timeless and true and a key warning of how a society may make outlaws out of its best material."
- David Thomson, Have You Seen.....?
"The most mature motion picture that has ever been made, in feeling, in purpose, and in the use of the medium."
- Otis Ferguson
"A sincere and searing indictment of man's cruel indifference to his fellows."
- Basil Wright
"....one of the earliest Hollywood films to reveal a genuine social conscience and to attempt a realistic treatment of ordinary people. Ford drew uniformly notable performances from his excellent team of actors and was able to make effective use of studio 'exteriors' thanks to the beautifully lit and composed photography of Gregg Toland."
- The Oxford Companion to Film
"Inspired by childhood memories of the great potato famine, John Ford's magnificent adaptation of John Steinbeck's book is somehow both sentimental and austere; it reminds you that Ireland is the land of Samuel Beckett as well as Sean O'Casey. Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland manage the unbelievable task of making Henry Fonda unrecognizable at first: His haggard, sallow face holds no trace of movie-star familiarity. The masterful Toland outdoes himself, surpassing even Steinbeck's rough-hewn poetry. The harsh light and menacing shadows split the world into temporary winners and all-time losers, with community the only way to weather the storm."
- Sam Adams, Philadelphia City Paper
"Ford's visualization of Steinbeck's novel is so emotionally gripping that viewers have little time to collect themselves from one powerful scene to the next...the picture had lost none of its power as a social document, a historical testimony, or a work of cinematic art."
- TV Guide
Compiled by Rob Nixon