Wednesday, January 22 @ 7:30 PM / NEIU — The Auditorium at NEIU — 3701 W Bryn Mawr Ave
Tickets: $10 at the door
THE GRAPES OF WRATH
Directed by John Ford • 1940
The 1939 publication of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was a massive, unruly cultural event, a frequently condemned and banned novel that became the year’s bestseller and winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Here was a book about Dust Bowl migrants that aspired to the poetry of the King James Bible, and 20th Century-Fox treated it accordingly, like a sacred text that demanded a scrupulous, faithful translation that (mostly) did not flinch from the profane, earthy aspects of the source. (Screenwriter Nunnally Johnson did soften the ending, and defended that choice to emphasize “something that would keep the people who saw it from going out and getting so drunk in utter despondency that they couldn’t tell other people that it was a good picture to see.”) Henry Fonda stars as ex-con Tom Joad, who returns from prison to find his family’s Oklahoma home is no refuge, but just another piece of property snatched away by predatory bankers and speculators. Soon the Joad family packs up their jalopy with all their earthly possessions to head west, to the promised land of California, only to be jeered at as Okies and chased away by hired cops. It remains astonishing that a major studio embraced the ugliness of Steinbeck’s novel head-on, and released a righteously angry depiction of unvarnished poverty that amounts to a call to revolution and a Molotov cocktail of prairie fire. Upon the film’s release, the critical reaction was effusive, bordering on rhapsodic. “There is no country in the world where such a film of truth could be made today,” averred Otis Ferguson in The New Republic, “let alone with such a smash that people pack into theaters to see it, and take it away home with them after. This is a thing not only to enjoy but to be proud about.” (KW)
128 min • 20th Century-Fox • 35mm from Criterion Pictures, USA
Preceded by: Henry Fonda trailer reel – 10 min – 35mm
NEXT UP: MY WINNIPEG on Wednesday, January 29 at NEIU