Hacker Cinema
The Grapes of Wrath
1940 · Film · 129 min
Directed by John Ford
Tom Joad returns to his home after a jail sentence to find his family kicked out of their farm due to foreclosure. He catches up with them on his Uncle’s farm, and joins them the next day as they head for California and a new life... Hopefully.
3 positive20 neutralfrom 23 commenters
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26 comments on Hacker News
Are you suggesting that government use of power is always benevolent?
Consider the enormous difficulty and expense people in Palisades have getting permits to rebuild.
Yes, I read "The Jungle". It's a work of fiction, not a documentary. So is "The Grapes of Wrath".
It's arguable that the US Thanksgiving tradition is itself a starvation myth, given that the 1629-21 winter killed off half the Plymouth pilgrims.
From Wikipedia...
>Squanto taught the Pilgrims how to catch eel and grow corn and served as an interpreter for them until he too succumbed to disease a year later. The Wampanoag leader Massasoit also gave food to the colonists when supplies brought from England proved insufficient. Having brought in a good harvest, the Pilgrims celebrated at Plymouth for three days in the autumn of 1621.
Another episode: Out of the 500 settlers at the Jamestown outpost, roughly 440 (88%) starved to death through the winter of 1609, and survivors had to resort to eating rats, mice, snakes, dogs, shoe leather, and belts, and even some cannibalism.
And that's before you get to the Great Depression and Dust Bowl era that gave us The Grapes of Wrath, migrant agricultural workers eating boiled weeds or flour mixed with lard, Hoover Stew, etc.
Not quite on the scale of Ukraine's Holodomor or Ireland's Great Famine, but it's interesting how the narrative around Thanksgiving has developed over time.
>Where did you get this stereotype of farmers?
it's not a hard guess even if you don't share the opinion ; nearly every movie where 'farmer' is a plot point demonstrates a rural-living poorly educated family living in dust-bowl conditions and barely scraping enough resource by to feed the animals.
grapes of wrath, wizard of oz, of mice and men, o brother where art thou, ballad of buster scruggs -- yes it's a stereotype , but it's a common one in movies and literature.
Two stories I heard recently; the Soviet Union tried some propaganda by showing people the movie 'Grapes of Wrath' and also saying people had to eat cat food to live.
Actual Russian reactions: 1. even the poor own trucks?! 2. they have special food for .. cats?!
Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck is a great writer, and he did a great job of illustrating the effects of poverty and how it controls people's actions. I often think about the camp that gives them a roof and restores their dignity. I want to create this sort of good in the world.
No more Mr Nice Guy - "Nice guys" do things to guilt people into reciprocating. When it doesn't happen in the way they expect (e.g. love), they get bitter. If you want something, say it. If you expect a specific kind of reciprocation, make it explicit.
How to win friends and influence people - I remember it as: if you want people to help you, be considerate of their needs and feelings. Seek mutually beneficial agreements. This is so unlike the way conflict resolution is portrayed in movies. It was an important lesson for teenage me.
The Secret Life of Trees - Trees are really cool! You should read The Overstory instead though, because it's a really good (fiction) book that touches on the same topics.
Salt, fat, acid, heat - The lesson is the title. Balance these 4 things, taste often. My cooking improved drastically after reading this book. It's recommended all the time for a reason.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving A F*ck - Konmari for social obligations. If it's not useful and doesn't bring joy, don't do it. Not worth reading past the first chapter, but still a great concept.
In the USSR they ran Grapes of Wrath, which focuses on the plight of the poor in America, in theaters as an attempt at anti US propaganda. It backfired spectacularly because the mostly poor audience mainly came out of it saying "in America even poor people have cars!"
The Soviet bureaucrats who came up with the plan were of course all from the upper class, and they cared so little for the poor in their anti-capitalist command economy that they didn't even realize how much poorer they were than the poor people in the movie.
In capitalism we make food so cheap that even poor people can get fat. If we put anti-capitalists like you in charge they will starve.
The Grapes of Wrath was NOT banned in the USSR. Here the list of of foreign movies shown in Soviet cinemas in 1948: https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%97%D0%B0%D1%80%D1%83%D0%B1%D0%B5%D0%B6%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D1%84%D0%B8%D0%BB%D1%8C%D0%BC%D1%8B,_%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%BF%D1%83%D1%89%D0%B5%D0%BD%D0%BD%D1%8B%D0%B5_%D0%B2_%D1%81%D0%BE%D0%B2%D0%B5%D1%82%D1%81%D0%BA%D0%B8%D0%B9_%D0%BF%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%BA%D0%B0%D1%82_%D0%B2_1948_%D0%B3%D0%BE%D0%B4%D1%83
I'm not sure what stronger sources you could expect than from embassies.
Travel wasnt as common or as free as it is today. Russian and Western societies were completely cut off. The only real sources you would have is word of mouth. The word of mouth was likely to be a reporter or an embassy worker. Otherwise the odd tourist, but I'm not sure how a tourist was supposed to gauge the impact of Grapes of Wrath in another country and/or why a tourist's word should be held above those of reporters/embassy workers.
The reality is that everything we know about life behind the Iron Curtain since it came down indicates that there is no reason this couldn't happen. Cars were extremely rare and expensive in the USSR. Cars were significantly cheaper and plentiful in the United States. The only point of contention is whether people living in the USSR watching a movie about the United States would be fascinated by the fact that even the poor in the United States had cars, something even middle class to rich people in the USSR could not obtain easily.
That seems a fairly narrow point anyways, whether true or not.
So I pulled up what seems to be the original source for the Soviet car-envy reference. It's an April 13, 1955 bylined piece by C.L. Sulzberger in The New York Times, datelined Hollywood.
His article is really a wide-ranging essay about movie tastes and U.S perceptions around the world. The final sentences read: "The Russians managed to obtain a print of 'Grapes of Wrath' and displayed it widely behind the Iron Curtain, hoping to convey a harsh impression of the United States. But the main impression, reported by our embassies, was 'In America, even the tramps have cars.'"
Sulzberger (part of the family that owned/controls the NYT) was a well-regarded establishment journalist. So we're on pretty safe ground to assume that at least one U.S. diplomat told him what he quoted. But then it gets hazy. Was this just the diplomats' ready-loaded witty retort? Or an overheard murmur from a couple Russians? That'd be my guess. We're way short of knowing what the vast Slavic world deeply felt.
Kind of amazing how that sort of aside comes to be treated as broad-based fact nearly 70 years later.
Sort of clear, except that it doesn't mention Stalin or any source for the reason the film was "withdrawn," or for the fact that it was withdrawn, or for whether that withdrawal was a government ban.
Without any of that, the story is "The Grapes of Wrath ran for weeks in Soviet cinemas."
"In 1948 The Grapes of Wrath was allowed to play in Soviet cinemas because of its propaganda value, which was presumably to heighten awareness of the desperate misery of the Okies under the most advanced system of capitalism on the planet. After several weeks, however, the film—given the unbiblical title of The Road to Wrath—had to be withdrawn. Soviet audiences were apparently extracting the wrong lesson, since they could see for themselves that even the most dispossessed of America’s rural proletariat were shown driving automobiles."
from https://journals.openedition.org/lisa/802?lang=en which you linked. That quote seems pretty clear.
I think maybe the target ("#ftn2" in http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2) is confusing.
This response has a lot of detail about Stalin's thoughts and feelings. I could find no attributed reference to film version of The Grapes of Wrath being banned in the USSR. Do you have one?
The article says the reference is somewhere in here, but it does not seem to be: http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2
Pulling the movie from theaters and removing distribution of the movie behind the iron curtain is essentially banning it. This was 1940... there wasn't really any way for them to see the movie if they decided to not distribute it in the USSR. You couldn't VPN into American Netflix or torrent the movie to get it. It was an unofficial ban. The book hadn't been translated to Russian at the time.
The story (both movie and book) shows the darker side of capitalism and Stalin hoped it would make great propaganda to reinforce why capitalism doesn't work to make soviets grateful for communism. But instead, the people that saw the movie were just shocked that even the worst Americans were better off than the the average soviet citizen, which backfired on Stalin's intended goal.
More importantly, the ending of The Grapes of Wrath shows hope in even the darkest moments and a way that an American had the freedom to turn their luck around and give their family a fresh opportunity at life, even when they had seemingly lost everything. This showed power that the poorest Americans had, and soviets couldn't ever hope of having. That freedom was surely impactful.
This sounds made up. The movie was in Soviet theaters for "a few short weeks."
1) How long does it take to see a car,
2) if the censors cared about cars, why was the film released at all,
3) and how much longer than a few weeks do films run?
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Also what the given reference (http://lisa.revues.org/802?lang=en#ftn2) actually says is:
> Shown behind the Iron Curtain, The Grapes of Wrath elicited the common reaction that “in America even the tramps have cars.”
with no attribution for the quote, and no connection to Stalin or a Soviet theater run.
I've read all of those except for On the Beach. I probably wouldn't reread Grapes of Wrath but not because of any dislike--in fact the opposite for both book and film. I'd reread any of the others though I would probably be more inclined to rewatch the 1937 Lost Horizon film. It's a marvelous story but there's nothing particularly exceptional about Hilton's prose as I recall from reading a few of his books decades ago.
Movie soundtracks are about as memorable as they've always been. Most producers cheap out when it comes to the music, so you get a "cookie cutter" soundtrack of the day:
* The tinny, mostly brass in the 50s and 60s.
* The mostly silent 70s, or faux disco.
* The primitive, nondescript synths of the 80s.
* The "nouveau orchestra" of the 90s.
* The "deep bass sound" of the 2000s.
etc etc.
You'd be hard pressed to tell the musical difference between "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "The Grapes of Wrath". "Taxi Driver" and "The French Connection". "Rain Man" and "Splash". "Sixth Sense" and "Seven".
It's always the same for music, tv, movies, etc: Every decade has its gems, but most of it is crap.
Yes I guess I do read a bunch of non-work stuff, or stuff that may be work someday :P I did re-read Douglas Adams, and I guess I read The Grapes of Wrath, that's within the last decade... I'm sure I've read some New Yorker long pieces, and I guess I do watch a lot of film.
Hollywood has always been all about escapism. In the 1930's - the golden era of film - most of the offerings were aspirational and inspiring, not Grapes of Wrath gloom and doom, which was a lot of people's actual daily experience.
There's a reason the mainstream entertainment doesn't make non fantasy films - it's because they are a for profit business and there's no money in it.
The recent Churchill film, which was very loosely based on reality and flat out wrong in many areas was all about triumph over adversity etc. There's a good argument to made about fantasy films supposedly depicting actual historical events and people distorting mass reality. That's where my beef is with hollywood...
1984. A very powerful book. It really made a strong impression on me and definitely changed my views on politics, propaganda, governments and so on.
Capitalism and freedom. Helped me to understand capitalism and American right-wing ideology.
The grapes of wrath. Actually, I haven't read the book, only watched the movie. It puts into perspective what we see happening with refugees in Europe.
I'm not going to claim to be a connoisseur of literature, so perhaps I've just overlooked the greatness. The point I was trying to make is that the book takes a great many pages to advance the plot relatively little. If you're familiar with the musical adaptation and are expecting a more plot-driven novel, you probably won't find that the book meets those expectations. I have not seen any of the movie adaptations, and cannot comment on them; on the basis of your recommendation, I probably will not.
As I recall, structurally, the novel is somewhat like The Grapes of Wrath, with expository sections interspersed with sections that directly advance the plot. I quite liked that about the Grapes of Wrath. I'm not sure if I take issue with the exposition/advancement ratio in Les Miserable, or if I feel less of a connection with the period Les Miserables is set in.
For children or not, I certainly won't hold The Princess Bride up as example of greatness. I would claim that the fact that it works as a send-up of a genre, including the alleged abridgement, is illustrative of something.
Yes, exactly.
I watched the Grapes of Wrath (1940) a few years ago. The amount of pro-communist idealization in the film would never, ever be allowed to play in a main-stream theater in the US today.
I think most younger people don't realize that communism was a huge threat to the US Capitalist system pre-Soviet-breakup, and because of that, a very large propaganda campaign was waged until the 90's. The remnants we see today are why an effective attack on Bernie Sanders was to associate him with socialism / communism.
Obviously, young people didn't fall for the tactic. Older folks who had been taught to fear and hate communism for much of their earlier lives, on the other hand, were influenced heavily by the attack.
His characters (in particular the early ones) were John Fords characters. He always took complex stories to direct rather than pulp and even directed the Grapes of Wrath which was about as left wing / communist as you could get away with in hollywood at the time.
Even though both wayne and ford are conservatives they both made films that were more complex than just espousing this 'all american' view which people seem to dump on wayne particularly.
I just watched the grapes of wrath last night for the first time. Amazing movie. It was released in 1940, just a year after the book.
I guess some things will never change, unfortunately.
I hope someone gives these poor workers the decent wages and decent lives they deserve, and soon.
Smart enough to realize it's a work of fiction? I often hear college educated people claim "The Jungle" and "The Grapes of Wrath" are historical documentaries.
Ebert is criticizing games without actually playing them, just watching other people talk about them. This is like saying movies aren't art, because if all you do is read movie reviews, you will never read a movie review that can compare with Infinite Jest or The Grapes of Wrath.
Braid is better art than any movie that came out last year.
These days, the commonly accepted wisdom is that movies were always as bad as they are now, and anyone who says otherwise is just idealizing the past. I offer the following evidence that the quality of movies is not constant over time:
1939: Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, Gone With The Wind, The Wizard Of Oz, Stagecoach, Ninotchka, Wuthering Heights
1940: Rebecca, Fantasia, His Girl Friday, The Grapes of Wrath, The Philadelphia Story, The Great Dictator
1941: Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels
Rather than relying on personal taste, I took these from various 'top 100' lists. I haven't seen all of them myself, but the ones I have seen are a mile apart from anything released this year, or any recent year.