The Grapes of Wrath

 

THE GRAPES OF WRATH        B                 

USA  (129 mi)  1940  d:  John Ford 

Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there’s an end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester. 81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north. Edmond, McLoud, Purcell. 66 out of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro, Elk City and Texola; and there’s an end to Oklahoma. 66 across the panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Amarillo, the yellow. Wildorado and Vega and Boise, and there’s an end of Texas. Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexico mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe. Then down the gorged Rio Grande to Los Lunas and west again on 66 to Gallup, and there’s the border of New Mexico.

And now the high mountains. Holbrook and Winslow and Flagstaff in the high mountains of Arizona. Then the great plateau rolling like a ground swell. Ashfork and Kingman and stone mountains again, where water must be hauled and sold. Then out of the broken sun-rotted mountains of Arizona to the Colorado, with green reeds on its banks, and that’s the end of Arizona. There’s California just over the river, and a pretty town to start it. Needles, on the river. But the river is a stranger in this place. Up from Needles and over a burned range, and there’s the desert. And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance. At last there’s Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good mountains, and 66 winds through them. Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city. And, oh, my God, it’s over.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

The definitive work of the Great Depression, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel is one of those rare books that was the best selling book of the year while also winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, which along with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, may well be the most thoroughly discussed and best analyzed books currently being taught in American classrooms.  It immediately captured the nation’s attention, becoming a lynchpin of cultural history and also one of the most beloved novels of American literature.  Steinbeck was a California writer who grew up in the Salinas Valley, where he wrote a series of seven articles about migrant worker communities for The San Francisco Chronicle, as tens of thousands of Americans were migrating to California during the Dust Bowl era of the mid 30’s, where Steinbeck spent time getting to know families living in the various migrant worker camps.  Infuriated by the amount of inhumane suffering he witnessed, he turned his disgust into a novel, which from the outset was controversial, showing unmitigated sympathy for the plight of the poor by exposing the cruel aspects of capitalism, which lead to a backlash against the author close to home, where the Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as a “pack of lies,” and labeled it “communist propaganda.”  Actually, the novel is to a large degree an outraged response to a government ideology of fear steeped in the paranoia of red scares, where immigrants and outsiders are deemed unpatriotic, where government propaganda demonizes and marginalizes unions out of greed and indifference.  This “realist” aspect of the novel is only hinted at in the movie, which was seen as an Oscar hopeful, so Hollywood could not present a supposedly true story about the government in this light.  It’s also interesting to note that at this stage in his career, director John Ford (who won the Academy Award for Best Director) was a leftist, describing himself in 1937 as “a definite Socialist Democrat, always left,” supporting liberal causes of the 30’s, such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league, and sent money to the anti-Franco, anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, while also becoming one of the founding members of the Screen Director’s Guild, a union that was extremely unpopular with studio executives.  Ford aimed to reproduce the Depression era style of photographers like Oklahoma-born Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, and New Deal U.S. Resettlement Administration, government-produced documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), becoming one of the first films selected to be in the National Film Registry in 1989. 

Twentieth Century Fox producer Daryl Zanuck, who purchased the rights to the book, actually hired a detective agency to investigate the migrant labor camps in California to see if the conditions were as bad as Steinbeck claimed in the book, and to no one’s surprise the agency reported back to Zanuck that the conditions were actually worse than what was portrayed in the novel, where Eleanor Roosevelt took it seriously enough that she called for congressional hearings on migrant labor camp conditions.  Zanuck then gave Ford free reign to make the film as brutally realistic as he could.  One assumes Ford took this project very seriously by his approach to the visual style, hiring Hollywood’s best cinematographer, Gregg Toland (who wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award), who the following year filmed Orson Welles’ legendary masterwork CITIZEN KANE (1941), and incredibly the production was completed just 6 months after the book was originally published.  Set during the Great Depression, the story follows the Joads, a poor Oklahoma family of sharecroppers in the early 30’s who must move as the bank is kicking all the tenant farmers off their land, claiming dire circumstances brought on by Dust Bowl drought and economic hardship.  Along with literally thousands of other Okies who are in the exact same predicament, they migrate West to California, where they hear jobs are plentiful.  While Steinbeck alternates chapters describing the land, the people and their hardships, painting a picture touching on all the things the country was going through with the story of the Joad family, focusing upon their epic journey West, where part of the beauty of the book is a fascination with all the places they traveled through and certainly the wonderfully descriptive language:

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool.

The first part of the film version accurately follows the book, with the dialogue almost intact from the page, though instead of joining up with other families, the Joads remain on their own and arrive in California more quickly, while the second half veers into different territory, creating a more uplifting, visionary ending, as the downbeat and miserablist original ending is something that recollection suggests has never been shown on a movie screen.  A few striking observations from the outset, for such a realist drama with documentary style elements, one is surprised to see so much of the film take place in the restricted confines of a studio movie set, and minimally showcase the vast endless landscapes of the great outdoors (which surface later in Ford’s Westerns), shots that might reflect the majestic character of America, and the extraordinary beauty of the book’s language.  Instead, much of the early shots take place at night, where faces are lit like flittering ghosts when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), just out of prison on parole after killing a man in a barroom brawl, discovers his family has left their homestead, and instead finds Muley (John Qualan) and former preacher Casy (John Carradine) on the premises, where they’re seen talking by candlelight.  Despite the impressive cinematography, what stands out is the artificiality rendered in these early shots, where there’s little hint of realism, while the repeated orchestral refrains of “The Red River Valley” only grow monotonous.  Even more surprising is the exaggerated and wildly uneven sense of caricature from all the actors involved with the exception of Fonda as Tom Joad, who is one of the great characters of literature, and one of the great portrayals in American film as well, as this is arguably Fonda’s greatest performance, especially since Tom is a flawed individual with such a checkered past.  His Midwest, folksy inflection literally breathes authenticity into these lines of such a plain speaking man, making the iconic character come to life, becoming synonymous with fair play and social justice, as he always defends the principles of small town morality, where rewards are based upon honesty and hard work, where no man is better than any other.  “Maybe it’s like Casy says.  A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul.  The one big soul that belongs to everybody.”     

As they cross the country among the legions of others, this sense of ordinary human decency is on display in a local restaurant when the owner and waitress give Pa Joad a break on the prices for a loaf of bread and a few pieces of candy, where their kindness represents the generous spirit of those who willingly help others in a time of need.  By the time they get to California, however, the ultimate conflict of the film is the violation of those simple American principles, where the Joad family symbolizes the casualties of the Depression, where the openhearted kindness of the Joads runs up against heartless authorities of the bank, but also includes the police and their paid deputies who represent the farm interests, where neighborhood trust is replaced by suspicion and blunt force.  Our first look at one of the destitute migrant camps still leaves a picture in our heads long afterwards, and it’s one of the best shots in the film, showing hordes of people living in squalor, passing by crowds of people that literally give them cold, haunting stares, vividly expressing the fear of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, and reveals the extent of the cruel labor exploitation, as there is an oversupply of workers who are forced to work for next to nothing, and anyone who tries to organize or warn workers of the potential hazards of quick wage cuts has to answer to rogue deputies with guns and nightsticks.  At one point, they’re led in secret, under police escort, into a fenced-in and locked living compound at a peach orchard, where they’re not told the circumstances but immediately ordered to work, forced to buy food supplies at the inflated prices of the company store, where without realizing it, they’re actually strikebreakers filling in at half the wages of the striking workers.  Things only go from bad to worse, where Tom’s friend Casy is murdered right before his eyes, where he wants to strike back, but its clear California doesn’t want this influx of migrant workers, where law enforcement seems determined to drive these unwanted “outsiders” into slave wages and servitude.  Pitted against these brutally deteriorating conditions, Tom Joad becomes a symbol, an identifiable everyman character who must rise up and stand against this enveloping madness, personifying a desperate hope for people who struggle, becoming a clarion call for economic justice, embodying the spirit for social justice that will live on for generations to come, as if that is our patriotic duty.  In the film, however, it’s Ma Joad (Jane Darwell, winner of Best Supporting Actress) who has the last word, voicing an uplifting, anthem-like vision of a new day ahead, led by a “We the people” reference to our nation’s founding principles.

The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE              A 
USA  (123 mi)  1962  d:  John Ford

This is the West, sir. When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.
—Maxwell Scott (Carleton Young), newspaper editor

The last great work by Ford, which interestingly looks back at characters who are themselves reflecting back upon their lives, making this something of a memory play where Ford not only examines his own role in revitalizing the American Western, using some of his own stable of familiar stars to do it, he also questions the truth about our own history, raising some interesting questions about the role of newspapers, government, literature, cinema, and other artforms, showing how truth is often buried in order to form a more perfect and idealized legend, which becomes the substitute for the truth, but instead of an examination of the misperceptions of history, much of this film unfortunately feels like a rationalization for the director’s own actions.  Certainly Ford is guilty of elevating heroes to mythical status, like the iconic stature of actor John Wayne, seen as the great American hero, the man who boldly stands above all others as an example of hard grit and that individual frontier spirit, always seen as the toughest guy and the fastest gun in the West.  But despite his penchant for so-called accuracy and historical authenticity, Ford also negatively stereotypes the West, creating racial stigmas that have lasted through generations for more than half a century, where his repeating stream of derogatory stereotypical images have contributed mightily to the racist depiction of Indians as savages in order to make way for the coming white settlers, where his own mythology has not only proven inaccurate, but helped perpetuate the myth of white superiority in a historical era of the American West when Indians were subject to attack by the U.S. Cavalry and forced to a life on isolated reservations, or total annihilation if they refused.  Surrender often led to starvation, rotten food, or worse, as so many Indians died from infection and contagious diseases. This bleak inevitability coincides with the slaughter of the plains buffalo to near extinction, all but eliminating their food source and the Indian way of life, a nomadic existence that followed the buffalo herds.  You won’t find any cultural reference to Indian genocide or extermination in a John Ford movie, with the exception of the apologetic Cheyenne Autumn (1964), which instead focuses on the legendary white heroes who settled the West. 

One of Ford’s best films, as it’s likely his most provocative and self-reflective work, THE MAN WHO SHOT LIBERTY VALANCE is a different kind of western, as it’s not shot in the great outdoors of the Monument Valley and doesn’t include a single Indian, instead it’s a chamber drama that moves indoors as it looks back at the first vestiges of democracy and government in action, as represented by a feisty but thoroughly domesticated James Stewart as Ransom Stoddard, a man hell-bent on bringing what he learned from East coast law school to the savage wilderness of the West, pitted against notorious gunslingers and outlaws like Lee Marvin’s deranged Liberty Valance, a sadistic killer turned monster, hired by the wealthy cattle barons to force their will upon the populace, as they believe in open range as far as the eye can see with absolutely no government intervention.  Stuck in the middle of so-called progress is John Wayne as Tom Doniphon, given the reverential treatment here, as it’s his funeral that brings an ominous tone of solemnity to the opening of the film, told nearly entirely in flashback.  Doniphon is seen as a man already forgotten, as time has passed him by, yet he’s the heart of the story, as the West would never have survived without men like him.  Ford absolutely loves paying tribute to characters like this, unsung heroes that fought the pitch battles in a lawless frontier out in the middle of nowhere to make the world better for those that followed, laying the groundwork for a progress yet to come, eventually becoming a reality through the construction of the railroad, which changed the West, as humans came in droves afterwards.  This western is not interested in the Wild West, which Ford has already shown before, where men like Doniphon and Liberty Valance prevailed, but in the taming of the West, showing the first signs of civilization, when men put down their guns and attempted to reason with one another, developing the first laws of the land, where the idea of an endless frontier instead emerges into the first arguments on statehood, becoming a highly entertaining piece of feelgood, patriotic Americana, the kind of thing you can watch on the 4th of July along with Cagney’s YANKEE DOODLE DANDY (1942). 

Something of an auteur project, Ford located the property, developed the script along with long-time associates Willis Goldbeck and James Warner Bellah and raised half of the money needed himself, while choosing an all-star cast, including the first time John Wayne and James Stewart worked together in a movie.  The film represents an older and wiser man in the twilight of his career looking back, having already made MY DARLING CLEMENTINE (1946) and THE SEARCHERS (1956), critically acclaimed works that suggest something of an alternative mythology while accentuating the struggles between the individual and society, or chaos and civilization.  The decision to shoot the film in Black and White was startling to some, as the western genre in the 60’s tended to glorify the West by emphasizing the beauty of the landscape through panoramic Cinemascope vistas, like THE MAGNIFICENT SEVEN (1960) or Peckinpah’s Ride the High Country (1962), but this film was shot in the murky darkness of confined spaces, creating a claustrophobic, character driven world where Stewart, for instance, spends the majority of the time wearing an apron and washing dishes with Vera Miles as Hallie and the other women in the restaurant kitchen.  It’s quite a contrast to Wayne’s swaggering outdoor independence, a man who wouldn’t be caught dead doing women’s work.  Interesting enough, both men are vying for the same woman (outside of a Mexican cantina, she is the only available woman seen in town), though their lives are on different trajectories, as Doniphon is doomed to live in a world where he cannot adapt, while Stoddard becomes one of the West’s first schoolteachers attempting to eradicate an epidemic of illiteracy.  The already outdated western hero loses his girl and fades into obscurity while the lawyer from the East, a veritable Lincoln among the ruins, marries Hallie and rises to political power, becoming a 3-time Governor before ascending to the United States Senate.  Meanwhile, in the ultimate showdown between good and evil, order and violence, or truth and legend, the awkward tenderfoot Stoddard stubbornly faces off against the gleefully overconfident Liberty Valance as the rest of the town shirks its responsibilities, hiding in the crevices and cracks in the dark, best expressed by the over-eating, freeloader sheriff Andy Devine as Marshall Link Appleyard, a man who stays alive by continually avoiding confrontation.    

One interesting aspect of the film is it never shows the audience definitively who kills Liberty Valance, though most would assuredly think it does, but it’s impossible to tell from the footage provided just who’s gun the bullet came from, nonetheless, a legend is born, as Stoddard most certainly takes all the glory and credit which stays with him throughout his lengthy career, immortalized throughout history as the two men remain inseparable.  What Ford pessimistically shows is how fate is more of an accident or even a misunderstanding, while history depends largely upon who’s telling it.  By the time this film opens, at the end of Stoddard’s illustrious career, the West has already been settled and the myth of the western hero is remembered only in storybooks and flashbacks.  Stoddard may have attempted to bring the civilized values of the East to the town of Shinbone, but he only does it through deception and violence, earning his reputation not through the law, but by killing an evil incarnate.  At a nominating convention for statehood, his name is dragged through the mud as a murderer and his reputation sullied by the flowery language of the cattle baron’s mouthpiece, none other than John Carradine as Major Cassius Starbuckle, whose own candidate is nothing more than a grotesque spectacle.  But Stoddard has his own image-maker in the form of newspaper publisher and town drunk Dutton Peabody, Edmund O’Brien, whose own overly verbose, chiché-ridden performance nearly ruins the film with such an obnoxious, self-inflated sense of ego, where at one point in a rambling drunken stupor he even resorts to quoting (incorrectly) Shakespeare’s Henry V.  Yet it’s Peabody that sings the praises of Stoddard, anointing him to his new career as a mythical western hero, a noisy, frenetically wild sequence of pure mayhem and pandemonium where Ford seems to enjoy mocking the origins of the American political process with the same cynical tone reserved for the equally empty rhetoric of today.          

What’s truly groundbreaking about this film is the way Ford reverses the wheels, turns his back on his success, and makes a film that challenges the same assertions that led to his success in the first place.  This suggests a man confident enough of his place in history that he can challenge it while he’s still alive.  The stark look of the film, taking place entirely in one’s mental recollections, makes it almost an anti-western, where Doniphon’s bold and reckless man of the West has already outlived his time.  Usually placed just after THE SEARCHERS among Ford’s greatest works, it’s an interesting critique of his own mythmaking career, one that suggests history is filled with quasi-heroes, men whose public image and persona have been beefed up to hide and obscure the far different private lives behind the image, where suppression of the truth is a natural byproduct of the mythmaking process.  In this manner, the nation’s confidence is propped up by political lies and distorted exaggerations, where one assumes this is preferable to hearing the unwholesome truth.  But it also suggests “official” explanations may be leaving out what actually happened, case in point The Tillman Story (2010) or The Invisible War (2012).  While this rather dark and sinister film is itself closer to the truth, it’s also highly entertaining and often hilarious, such as when young Ransom Stoddard shuts down the bar, by law, while voting is in progress at the territorial convention, calling it one of the “Fundamental laws of democracy, no exception,” and Dutton Peabody is repeatedly reminded by Tom Doniphon that the bar is closed, yet he keeps squirming for just a beer, as “a beer’s not drinking!”  Reminded once again that there’s no exceptions, he quivers, “Why that’s carrying democracy much too far!”  The film’s maniacal violence from the whip-wielding Liberty Valance, who has to be held back by his own men, actually anticipates even greater, exaggerated choreographed extremes from Sam Peckinpah, Sergio Leone, and even Clint Eastwood, where ironically Liberty Valance’s two henchmen include Peckinpah’s Strother Martin and Leone’s favorite villain, Lee van Cleef.  Nowhere in the film, by the way, does Gene Pitney sing “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance,” though it is advertised in the film’s posters and movie trailer.  Almost overlooked in the structure of the film, due to the central tension focused between Stoddard, Doniphon, and Valance, is the film’s concern with American politics and the birth of civilization in newly formed western towns, showing democracy in action at such fundamental levels by showing the significance of the role of the press, a town meeting, a debate over statehood, and the influence of education—all indoor preoccupations. 

Something should be said about Woody Strode, Tom Doniphon’s black sidekick Pompey, who worked in five John Ford movies, from his final film going all the way back to STAGECOACH (1939).  Though Doniphon treats him like he owns him, viewed as his loyal and obedient lackey, being John Wayne’s confidante in this film also gives him a certain elevated status with the audience, as they know his loyalty is not in dispute, that he always has Tom’s back, but he’s still not allowed into the saloon in Shinbone, as the bartender won’t serve a black man.  This little bit of racial harmony among friends, but disharmony within the larger society, is interesting, as Ford is intentionally bringing attention to this racial disparity, pointing out the injustice, something he failed to notice with his own belittling portrayal of Indians.   

Boxcar Bertha

BOXCAR BERTHA                B-                   

USA  (88 mi)  1972  d:  Martin Scorsese

They call it a depression...that's the word I got for this empty feeling inside.           

—Boxcar Bertha (Barbara Hershey)

A Depression-era exploitation flick from B-movie producer Roger Corman, who also helped apprentice directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, James Cameron and John Sayles launch their careers.  It was Corman who taught Scorsese that films could be made with next to no money or time, preparing him well for the challenges to come in the movie industry.  The Corman mantra was making films replete with sex and violence.  Other than an uncredited stint directing a few short scenes in Leonard Kastle’s The Honeymoon Killers (1969), this is only Scorsese’s second film, where “Roger just told me, ‘Read the script, rewrite as much as you want, but remember, Marty, that you must have some nudity at least every fifteen pages.  Not complete nudity, but maybe a little off the shoulder, or some leg just to keep the audience interest up.”  The film is loosely based upon the life of Bertha Thompson, a fictional composite of three women described in Sister of the Road – The Autobiography of Boxcar Bertha, by Dr. Ben L. Reitman, a tramp, hobo, doctor, and social activist, providing a provocative glimpse into a way of life most never see or ever hear about.  Bertha grew up in communes, railway yards, and hobo camps that her mother operated, practicing and preaching free love.  Her education was listening to vagrants, socialists, and other radicals, cris-crossing the country by rails by the time she was a mere 16, already expert in the hoboing way of life before she met up with various labor organizers in the early 30’s, attempting to reform the practices of the railways by advocating strikes, where they met up with their share of shotguns and violence.  While her wandering lifestyle led to personal horrors and nightmarish pitfalls, for the most part she remained upbeat, an optimist determined to make the best of it, never thinking ill of her fellow wanderers, always trying to fathom why people do the things they do.  She represents the many thousands of men and women who dropped out of mainstream society to live a life on their own terms, individualistic stories rarely told in the history books.     

Shot by cinematographer John Stephens, whose range includes Frankenheimer’s futuristic SECONDS (1966) to Tom Laughlin’s insipid BILLY JACK (1971), in 24 days with a $600,000 budget on location in Reader, Arkansas, the film is fortunate to have Barbara Hershey in the lead role, appearing in nearly every shot of the film, a California native mastering an Ozark accent, always giving the impression she was a born natural, a contemporary of the Bonnie and Clyde bank robber outlaws on the run during the Depression.  The film is significant as it’s the first Scorsese film, a director known for his depiction of masculinity, to focus upon a woman, a foreshadowing of later films ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANYMORE (1974), New York, New York (1977), and THE AGE OF INNOCENCE (1993).  It was also Hershey who presented the director with the book The Last Temptation of Christ, which in 1988 became one of Scorsese’s most ambitious and controversial films.  What makes Bertha a Scorsese character is her wayward nature, an isolated and lost soul who is in danger of losing herself to her own loneliness, afraid to live a purposeless life without love.  The opening credit sequence is one of the best things in the film, a montage of locomotives in dissolves set to the sounds of a rhythmic harmonica, where right off the bat the scene is set between the capitalist big bosses from the railroad and the common union workers looking out for the little man, where the multiple shots of a locomotive may as well be a phallic symbol for male brute force and power.  Scorsese was nearly fired at the outset for spending so much time filming trains from every angle and speed, but they are often used as transitions between scenes.  This is a film about class warfare, where the railroad bosses send in their thugs to burn and destroy the strikers living in hobo camps, which in their view are filled with “reds and Bolsheviks,” including public enemy number one, legendary social agitator and union rabble rouser Big Bill Shelley (David Carradine), who they aim to murder outright, no questions asked.  Carradine and Hershey were lovers in real life at the time, and keeping it in the family, his father John Carradine ironically appears later as the corporate railway magnate keeping the hired gun thugs on Shelley’s trail. 

While true to salacious exploitation flicks, Hershey has many nude scenes with Carradine, some of which were featured in a more explicit spread in Playboy magazine at the time, Corman required sex, violence, or explosions every fifteen pages of script, having his hand in every aspect of the lurid promotion of the film.  When Scorsese showed a rough cut of his film to fellow director John Cassavetes, who would have just completed MINNIE AND MOSKOWITZ (1971) where Scorsese worked as a sound effects cutter, his response was reportedly:  “Marty, you've just spent a year of your life making a piece of shit,” before adding, “It’s a good movie, but don't get hooked into that (commercial) stuff -- just try to do something personal,” encouraging him to work on the films he wanted to make instead of someone else’s project.  While there’s not a lot of character development, there is a lot of character, especially in Hershey’s performance, where Bertha and Bill hook up while hopping trains and become an interesting team, along with a large-sized black friend (who in real life played professional football), Bernie Casey as Von Morton, a soft-spoken harmonica player and loyal friend of the common man.  Once the goons burn them out of their hobo camps, they continue to hound them on the rails, as ironically it’s the only way they can guarantee free passage during a Depression, eventually arresting Bill and Von, where Bertha engineers a jailbreak, where they’ve been cornered into a notorious life of criminality, reading about themselves in the papers, eventually becoming fairly proficient bank robbers, even robbing the railroad executives.  Scorsese hasn’t time or money to set up detailed action sequences, so instead he’s gone for a somewhat trashy but highly atmospheric mood piece, something along the lines of Robert Altman’s THIEVES LIKE US (1974), which stars Carradine’s younger brother Keith.  While the last half hour is surprisingly good, the men again incarcerated, where Bertha, alone and destitute, falls into a house of prostitution, where Scorsese interestingly enough is one of her clients.  Holding the tension until the very end, it’s a Scorsese-like finale, filled with an interesting mix of religious symbolism and existential ambiguity, a bleak look into the prophetic politics of the era, where corporate interests were protected using a fascist model, violently suppressing unions and individual freedoms in the process.      

Drums Along the Mohawk

DRUMS ALONG THE MOHAWK    C-                   

USA  (103 mi)  1939  d:  John Ford

You’d think this was James Fenimore Cooper territory, and historically and geographically it is something of a lesser substitute, adapted from a popular Walter D. Edmonds historic novel taking place exclusively in the Mohawk Valley of upstate New York.  Ford’s first film shot in Technicolor, this is something of a prelude to the eventual victory of the Revolutionary War, a glimpse of what was at that time seen as a hard life on the frontier, hunting and farming mostly, where grizzled, backwoods types fill the landscape along with other hard-nosed Christian families, where the threat of Indians and the unsettled affairs of establishing a new nation add an element of uncertainty into their lives.  The film was a commercial success, largely due to the popularity of two big name stars, where a shocking lack of chemistry exists straightaway in newlyweds Lana and Gilbert Martin, the rich and pampered city girl, Claudette Colbert, who overacts in every scene, crying and fainting often, and the morally upright and ever understated Henry Fonda, in a film sandwiched between playing Abraham Lincoln in YOUNG MR. LINCOLN (1939) and Tom Joad in THE GRAPES OF WRATH (1940).  This is one of Ford’s weaker Westerns, as the Revolutionary War has never played well in motion pictures, and this is no exception, becoming a grim, costume melodrama shot largely in the outskirts of Utah.  The on-location scenery works well, where cinematographers Bert Glennon and Ray Rennahan received Academy Award nominations, but the story itself is suffocatingly restricted, often told from the women’s point of view while the men are away at war, where one grows weary of Lana’s overreaching sense of drama, but more importantly, the demonized and stereotypical depiction of Indians as savages is overdramatized, largely because there’s no British presence to speak of, so the settlers are continually fighting Indians instead of the British, who never fire a single shot.     

The film has a heavy handed tone of black and white moral certainty throughout, where the Revolutionary War is seen as a battle between God fearing Christians and heathen Indians, giving it an annoyingly self-righteous tone, where there’s a single British character in the movie, John Carradine wearing an eye patch, a Tory who mobilizes the Indians against the “Americans,” seen early in the film burning their farms and their crops.  The one friendly Indian, Chief Big Tree (the model for the Indian head nickel) as the character Blue Back, is a Christian convert who takes on all the “Uncle Tom” characteristics, speaking that barely decipherable Navajo English, and is largely used for ill-advised comic relief, offering a few “Hallelujahs” in inappropriate places, also the gift of a whipping switch for Gilbert to beat his woman to keep her in line.  So if you can get past the Bible thumping, fundamentalist Holy War aspect of the film, which is truly a gross distortion of history, much like Victor Fleming’s similarly embellished GONE WITH THE WIND (1939) made that same year melodramatically distorts the Civil War, there are familiar Ford characteristics that play out well.  The most important aspect of living in the wilderness is the portrayal of a sense of community, where displaying courage under fire is seen as a distinctly American trait, right alongside helping neighbors by clearing their fields and collectively rebuild, sheltering the injured and the needy, where Fonda’s notable humility is particularly appealing.  Often forced to take protection from a nearby military post, the theme of the film is expressed by General Herkimer (Roger Imhof), “This is our land and it’s worth fighting for.”  Rounding up all the able bodied men, they march off to fight in General Washington’s army, presumably motivated by duty and faith, leaving their families behind to endure the insufferable consequence of not knowing, having to sit and wait, where we only hear about the war’s development when the wounded men return, where losing 400 out of 600 men is the price to pay for victory.  

What differs here from typical Ford films is the camera doesn’t follow the action, where it’s not so much about the war itself or the men, his usual subjects, but is a portrait of the evolving transformation of Lana from a hysterically out-of-place rich girl into a highly capable frontier woman.  Granted, Colbert is probably not the right woman for the role, but Ford has a fondness for her near perfect, pin-up style close ups, where he’s likely a firm believer that soldiers carry a picture of the woman they love in their pockets as a reminder of what they’re fighting for.  The woman behind Lana’s transformation is a no frills, tough as nails frontier widow played by Edna May Oliver, also nominated for Best Supporting Actress, who is easily the best thing in the movie.  Her ornery defiance is both laudatory and comical, especially when she refuses to be removed from her bed when her home is invaded and burned by Indians, forcing them to carry her bed (with her in it) to safety.  She leads a cast where many secondary characters exhibit plenty of eccentric personality.  While there is an impressive Ford-like assault of the fort, featuring cannon fire and hand-to-hand combat, Gilbert interestingly decides to make a run for it, believing he can outrun any Indian, turning this into a strange endurance run through the forests and empty landscapes of the wilderness followed closely behind by three Mohawk Indians.  His perseverance brings needed reinforcements and helps turn the tide not just for this community, but for the birth of a new nation.  Just as Lana is initially seen wearing gigantic bonnets and elaborate, fashion inspired dresses, turning afterwards into farmer attire, and later even wears a Revolutionary War army coat with a musket in her hand, the church inspired community is also shown, to the music of “The Star Spangled Banner,” recognizing the significance of the first American flag, and in a highly dramatized, ceremonial final gesture, places it high atop the church, a premonition of Manifest Destiny.      

As it turns out, nearly 13,000 Native Indians fought with the British, most coming from the Iroquois tribes, where the Seneca, Onondaga, and Cayuga nations also sided with the British.  Because the settlers built a fort directly on the banks of the Mohawk River right in the heart of their territory, the Mohawk tribe also sided with the British.  After the American Revolution, most moved northward into Canada, again fighting against the United States in the War of 1812, where they continue to live in settlements in Southeastern Canada and New York State.  Among the most notable Mohawk Indians are Hiawatha, the subject of the epic 1855 poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Full text of "The song of Hiawatha", writer Pauline Johnson, artist Shelly Niro, and musician Robbie Robertson from The Band.