Great Moments From Cinema - 34

Sour Grapes
Movie: The Grapes Of Wrath (20th Century Fox; 1940)
Director: John Ford
Screenplay: John Steinbeck (novel) and Nunnally Johnson
Major Cast: Henry Fonda and Jane Darwell

Film Synopsis: Henry Fonda as ‘Tom Joad’ returns home from serving a manslaughter sentence, to find that his farm in Oklahoma has been foreclosed. The place is nothing more than a dust-bowl and his family is ready to move to California wine country in search of a better life. On reaching there, the ‘Joads’ find that poverty and unemployment are still facts from which they can’t escape.

My Favorite Moment: Fonda saying farewell to his ‘Ma’

Why I Like It: This may well be one of the greatest films ever made. Based on a Pullitzer prize winning book, the movie is a horrifying look at the great depression and the best social commentary on poverty in the 30’s. During the course of the film you can actually feel the people’s courage being crushed each day. The ‘Joads’ are a big family and they have packed all their belongings in a truck which just about makes it to California. On the way, they lose the grandparents and have to bury them by the roadside. In California, jobs are scarce and people like the ‘Joads’ are exploited for minimum wages. But for the sake of survival, they have to bear it and live each day in the hope of a better tomorrow, which sadly never comes.

In this scene, Fonda has accidentally killed a man, again, in self-defense and has to leave his family. He tries to sneak out in the night when his mother stops him. She can understand his decision and though it tears her apart, she has to agree to let him go. Fonda who has been completely disillusioned then says the following words which have become a part of cultural folklore: “I'll be all around in the dark - I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look - wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, I'll be there. I'll be there in the way guys yell when they're mad. I'll be there in the way kids laugh when they're hungry and they know supper's ready, and when people are eatin' the stuff they raise and livin' in the houses they built - I'll be there, too.” Fonda says this not in anger but in sorrow and the look in his eyes is of a person baring his soul because that is all he has left to give. This is plain and simply acting of the highest order and only his best friend Jimmy Stewart in 'The Philadelphia Story' prevented Fonda from winning the academy award.

Jane Darwell won an academy award for her portrayal of ‘Ma Joad’. She is heartbreakingly brilliant in the role of a person who has to maintain a brave face to keep the family together. She is distraught when she has just about enough food to give her family and has to watch other hungry children look expectantly. She just can’t help them because the reality of life is that each one has to look out for themselves and their own first. They say that human sprit can endure any calamity; however it is hard for these people to believe that. But perhaps not ‘Ma Joad’, who, at the end, with tears of resolution in her eyes, says to her husband: “Rich folk come up an' they die, an' their kids ain't no good an' they die out. But we keep a coming, Pa, cus' we're the people that live.”