The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
IMDB #149 [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0032551/]
The Gist:
Henry Fonda is Tom Joad, the immortal protagonist of John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. Tom gets out of prison for manslaughter and finds himself smack in the middle of the Great Depression. His family's farmland has been stolen out from under their feet, along with everyone else in the dust bowl, and the family leaves for California and the promise of work. California isn't quite the promise land its purported to be though. And thus drama ensues. For me, the film is a powerful representation of the disparity of poverty and the gut wrenching acknowledgment that every human being should have the right to eat, that no one should need to suffer the fate of slow starvation. The film doesn't hit this point too hard home though, and it doesn't need to. Today, our films would have and the result would have been a movie that "made you think" but you'd end up never seeing again because it depressed the hell out of you. The Grapes of Wrath has depressing qualities, but it has hope too, and a beautiful noir influenced aesthetic and Henry Fonda's incendiary performance and perfect adaptation screenwriting that all begs for repeated viewings.
Also, I haven't read it in full, but in the excerpts I have read of the book; the point is not to focus solely on dispair but to look at the hope as you say.
ReplyDelete*despair
ReplyDeleteHave you read the book? There are some important differences that I think bear acknowledgement.
ReplyDeleteChar you should put the book on your list when you do your blog. :)
ReplyDelete