The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
John Ford · a film · 1940 · about 129 minutes · from a screenplay by Nunnally Johnson, after John Steinbeck’s novel
Mode
Social drama of dispossession made as a road film; family chronicle, migration and passion in one
Mythos
Exodus: a people driven from the land, a desert crossed, a promised land that proves another Egypt; the elders dying in the wilderness; the preacher who dies for others and the disciple who goes out into the dark
Phase
One migration in the Dust Bowl years, from a parolee’s walk home to an empty house to a truck on the road again, the family’s stopping places each worse or less certain than the last
Presentation
Feature film in black and white, Academy ratio, about 129 minutes, in English; photographed by Gregg Toland, with music by Alfred Newman built on one folk tune
Register
From a house lit by one candle and a tractor’s shadow over a crouching family to an old man’s comedy and a dance at a government camp; the grave and the reassuring, with a seam between them
Scale
Three generations of one family, a dispossessed people, the bank, the growers and the state, along one road
Governing Proposition
A man comes home from prison on parole to find his family’s farm empty and the family about to be driven off the land by a bank no one can find, and he goes with them by truck to California, where the work they were promised is a weapon held against them. The wager of the film is that a studio picture can show a dispossessed people at the edge of sight, in the dark and in their own faces, and that a family’s road can carry an exodus whose promised land proves another bondage.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
A man walks along a road toward home. He is Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda, out of the state prison at McAlester on parole, and by the road he meets Jim Casy, played by John Carradine, a preacher who has lost the call. They walk on together to the Joad place and find it empty. In the dark house, by the light of a candle, they find Muley, played by John Qualen, a neighbour, and he tells them what has happened.
The film shows his account in flashback. The tractors come over the rise in silhouette. One drives straight through the house. The man on it is a neighbour’s son, paid three dollars a day to do it, and when the farmer looks for someone to blame for the loss of his land, there is no one: the owner cannot be found, and the bank is no one. The shadow of the tractor passes over the family crouched on the ground. Wind, shadow and machine make a dread that the film never quite lets go of, and the question of whom to blame is answered by nobody.
The film was made for Twentieth Century-Fox by John Ford, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, with Nunnally Johnson as screenwriter and associate producer, from John Steinbeck’s novel of 1939, a book that had been banned and burned in places and called communist. Gregg Toland photographed it in black and white, Robert L. Simpson edited it, and Alfred Newman wrote the music on the folk tune “Red River Valley”. It was released in January 1940 and runs about 129 minutes. Steinbeck’s novel stands on this desk at 8.6; the film is scored as a film, on what it achieves in its own medium, neither held down by its source nor credited for what it merely inherits.
Movement II
Tom finds his family at Uncle John’s place, packing a truck to go west on the promise of work in California. The household is three generations: Grampa, played by Charley Grapewin, who does not want to leave; Granma; Pa, played by Russell Simpson; Rosasharn, played by Dorris Bowdon; the children; and Ma, played by Jane Darwell. Casy comes along. The old people are played broad, for comedy, in a register the rest of the film does not share.
On the night before they leave, Ma sits alone before the stove with a box of keepsakes, sorting what she will keep and what she will burn. She holds a pair of earrings to her ears before a mirror. She says nothing. Newman’s accordion plays the old tune, and the camera stays on Darwell’s face. Then the box goes into the fire. It is the quietest scene in the film and its summit: a whole life given up in the time it takes to look at it, the loss of the land shown in a woman’s hands rather than said.
Grampa does not want to go, and the film shows literally what the land means to him: he cannot be separated from it and live. The truck pulls away with the family on it, a silhouette against the sky, and the road begins. From here the form is a sequence of stopping places, and each is worse, or less certain, than the one before.
Movement III
Grampa dies on the road, before the crossing, and is buried by the roadside. The elders of the people begin to die in the wilderness. There are filling stations and the plain business of the road. At a camp a man coming back from California tells them what is there: the handbills that brought them called for many times the men needed, and people have starved.
The family goes on, past a border inspection, and across the desert. When they come to its far edge and look down into the green valley, the land they were promised, Ma tells them that Granma died in the night. She has kept it to herself across the desert, until they arrived. Grief and promise are held in one view.
The structure is the old one, and it is built rather than evoked: a people driven from a land that was theirs by labour, a desert crossed, a promised land at the end of it. The film realizes it through the road itself. The truck against the sky, the family as a single silhouette, the deaths of the old man and the old woman at the two thresholds of the crossing: the myth is carried in images, and the film’s weakness is that it sometimes says aloud what the images have already said.
Movement IV
The valley is another bondage. In a camp of shacks and tents for the migrants, the deputies keep order for the growers, and a deputy fires. The law in the fields is the owners’ law, and the film shows it without argument. Surplus labour is the growers’ weapon: the more men the handbills bring, the lower the wage.
At the Keene Ranch the Joads pick peaches at a cut wage, and in the dark outside are strikers trying to stop the cut. Tom goes out and finds Casy among them. The preacher who had lost his call has found one in the strikers. In the dark Casy is killed, meeting his killer with a forgiveness, and Tom strikes the man who killed him. The preacher has died for the others, and from here Tom is his disciple.
The family leaves the ranch, and the film brings it to a government camp, with cheerful officials, a comic committee of the campers, a dance, and a riot that is foiled. Here the film changes key. The realist and nearly tragic law of the first half gives way to a reassuring one, and the camp is shown as close to a paradise. It is the family’s first respite, and the film’s seam.
Movement V
Tom is leaving. At night, on a bench by the dance floor, he says goodbye to Ma, and tells her in substance that he will go out as Casy did, and be everywhere the people are. Toland holds the scene almost black. Then Tom walks up the dark rise as the sky lightens behind it, and goes out of the family into the people.
The family is on the road again, in the truck, looking for work. Ma speaks the last words, and their substance is that the people go on. The speech says in words what her face at the stove and Tom’s walk up the rise have already shown, and it ends the film in endurance rather than in the condition it has disclosed. The weight of what the film has stated is lightened at the close, and the order that sets the refuge last, after the killing, feels arranged rather than compelled.
Ford won the Academy Award for direction and Darwell for supporting actress, and the film was named to the National Film Registry in its first year, 1989. It fixed the Dust Bowl migrant in the national image, and Tom Joad and his farewell became a figure that songs and later films came back to. Toland’s dark photography stood beside his work for Welles the next year. Ford’s The Searchers (1956), which stands at 8.7, would build its myth and its form more deeply; Dorothea Lange’s Migrant Mother (1936), a photograph of the same people in the documentary manner Toland’s images draw on, stands at 8.4. The film stands at 8.2. What has lasted is a road that does not arrive, and faces shown at the edge of sight.
Act III · The Twelve
Judged on structure, and a road is the hardest form to make necessary: stations can be added or taken away. Ford keeps most of them earning their place. Muley’s flashback is required, because it shows dispossession as weather with a contract behind it; Grampa’s death is required, because the old man cannot be separated from the land; Granma’s death across the desert, kept back by Ma until they arrive, is required. What could go without loss: some of the filling-station business, the comic grace of the camp’s committee men, part of the dance, and the closing speech in the truck, which says in words what Ma’s face and Tom’s walk up the rise have shown. The order that sets the camp last, after the killing, makes the end feel arranged rather than compelled.
Score: 8.0 / 10
The disclosure can be stated and holds: a people were moved off the land by an owner nobody can find, surplus labour is a weapon, and the law in the fields is the owners’ law. The eviction states the impersonality exactly: the man on the tractor is a neighbour’s son paid three dollars a day, and the bank is no one. The handbills calling for many times the men needed, the wage cut the strikers try to stop, the deputies who keep order for the growers: each is shown, not argued, and the faces under Toland’s light disclose exhaustion and pride as a social fact. Held below the bar because at its end the film turns disclosure into consolation: the government camp is shown as a near paradise, and Ma’s speech offers endurance as an answer. The condition is stated; its weight is lightened.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Elevation comes several times and at real height. Ma alone at night before the stove, sorting what she will burn, holding a pair of earrings to her ears before the mirror without a word, under Newman’s accordion, is the film’s quiet summit. The tractors come over the rise in silhouette, and in Muley’s flashback the tractor’s shadow falls across the crouching family: dread made into image. Tom’s farewell at night by the dance floor, and his walk up the dark rise as the sky lightens, is transport earned by the light it is spoken in. At the desert’s edge the family looks down into the green valley while Ma keeps what she carried: grief and promise in one view. Between these the pitch drops to Grampa’s comedy, the camp idyll and the plain business of the road.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The myth is built, and Exodus bears load. A people driven from a land that was theirs by labour cross a desert toward a promised land that proves another Egypt, and the elders die in the wilderness, Grampa before the crossing and Granma during it. The family’s movement is the myth’s movement. Casy, the preacher who has lost the call, with the initials J.C., dies for the strikers and meets his killer with a forgiveness; Tom becomes his apostle, going out into the dark to be everywhere; Ma is the hearth the road cannot put out. The film realizes this in image: the truck against the sky, the family as one silhouette. Held below the bar because the myth is in part stated, and the allegory sometimes shows too plainly.
Score: 8.4 / 10
The stake was real. A major studio, for its most commercial producer, filmed a novel that had been banned and burned in places and called communist, and Ford made it against the studio’s own gloss: dark interiors, real faces, little music, the photographic sobriety of the government’s documentary pictures of the Dust Bowl. For Hollywood in 1940 that is a turn in subject and in look. What holds the axis lowest of the twelve is the form and the hedge. The form is Ford’s classical form, and the matter is shaped toward reassurance: the camp set last, the political edge filed down to endurance, Ma’s speech at the close. A wager placed and then partly covered; a swerve inside the studio, not one that changed the grammar of film.
Score: 7.9 / 10
Substitute another form and what is lost is, above all, the light. The film knows what it knows through Toland’s low-key images: the dark house where Tom and Casy find Muley by a candle, faces lit from below or half lost, the farewell held almost black. That these people are being pushed out of sight is carried by their being shown at the edge of sight. The road, a sequence of stopping places each worse or less certain than the last, is the instrument of the knowledge that there is no arrival. Where the form weakens it becomes a container: the camp passages and the closing speech in the truck could stand in any decent studio picture, their matter delivered rather than embodied.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Return yields, and there is evidence for it. The photography rewards study; the eviction and Ma’s night with her keepsakes repay many viewings; and for more than eighty years the film has carried a live argument about adaptation and politics, about what a studio can say, about Ford’s populism and its limits, and about a Hollywood picture borrowing the look of documentary photography. That is evidence, not promise. But the film’s meanings are largely legible at a first viewing, and part of its debate concerns the novel and the studio rather than depth in the images themselves. It yields less on return than Ford’s The Searchers (1956), which stands at 8.9 on this axis.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Released in 1940, so force and reach are scored together, and the field is the cinema of its decade. The force: within American studio cinema the film made social realism respectable at the top of the industry, joined a novel of protest to the craft of the best-equipped studio, and brought a documentary photography into fiction. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: it fixed the Dust Bowl migrant in the national image, taught later American realism to light poverty without prettiness, made Tom Joad and his farewell a figure that songs and later films returned to, and with Toland’s work for Welles the next year stood as a model of deep, dark photography. Welles’s first film, Italian neorealism and film noir reorganized more; this reach is real and mostly national, and changed what Hollywood would film more than how film is made.
Score: 8.0 / 10
Survival is weighed on form, presence and fabric. The film survives whole as released: one version exists and has been restored, with no lost or altered cut to charge. Presence across eighty-six years is wide: continuous exhibition, television, schools and courses in American history and literature, a place in the National Film Registry’s first year, 1989, and the standing reference for the Dust Bowl in American memory. Film survival stands at 8.8 at most, for the widest presence, and this presence is wide but not the widest: its place with the general audience has thinned beside Ford’s Westerns, and part of its surface (the studio comedy, the camp as government advertisement, Ma’s speech) is fixed to its New Deal moment.
Score: 8.7 / 10
Command of the medium is high and in places load-bearing. Toland’s photography is among the finest in studio cinema: the candle-lit house, faces in darkness, silhouettes on the road, the night farewell held almost black. Ford’s framing and restraint are mastery of proportion, economy and the thing withheld: the keepsakes scene played without a word, the camera held on Jane Darwell, the deaths given by a look rather than shown. Newman’s score, nearly silent and built on one tune, is used sparingly, and Henry Fonda and Darwell carry the film. Against these: rear projection on the road, sets that sometimes show, broad comic turns among the old people, and an ending that reads as a correction rather than a maker’s conclusion. Short of The Third Man and Chinatown, each at 9.0 on this axis.
Score: 8.6 / 10
Take the two most distant elements: Muley’s flashback, where shadow, wind and the tractor make an expressionist dread, and the government camp, where cheerful officials, a dance and a comic committee make a New Deal pageant. Ford’s law is the family’s dignity under pressure, and both obey it: the camp is the family’s first respite, and the dance is where Tom’s farewell is set. But the tonal physics shift. The first half runs under a realist and nearly tragic law, the last movement under a reassuring one, and Ma’s closing speech is written in a key the eviction would not allow. Grampa’s comedy comes from another register again. A wide range, mostly held, with a real seam at the end.
Score: 8.1 / 10
Many orders are held in one structure: the family across three generations; labour and its price; property and the bank; the state, in deputies, a government camp and a border inspection; the land and its weather; migration as history; the sacred, in Casy’s lost faith; and the consciousness of a man who comes out of prison and goes out into politics. The family’s road holds them together rather than listing them: Grampa’s death is the land, Casy’s death is labour and the sacred together, Tom’s leaving is the family yielding to the people. What holds the axis is what stays outside: the inner life of most figures beyond Tom and Ma, and the larger economy beyond its effects. High for a film of about two hours.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable at 8.7 and The Made at 8.6, then The Unconcealment and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4. A film that survives whole in its one version, with a wide presence across eighty-six years; a command of light, framing and restraint that carries the knowledge of the film; a disclosure of dispossession, surplus labour and the owners’ law shown rather than argued; and an exodus built into the family’s road.
Limiting Dimension
The Swerve at 7.9: a real stake for a studio in 1940, made in Ford’s classical form and partly hedged by a matter shaped toward reassurance. Then The Inevitable, The Bottomless Well and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0: a road with stations that could go, a closing speech that restates the images; meanings largely legible at a first viewing; a reach that is real and mostly national, changing what Hollywood would film more than how film is made.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.0 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.1, The Made at 8.6, The Inner Law at 8.1, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet: The Imperishable at 8.7 clears the bar of 8.5, but The Unconcealment at 8.4 and The Archetypal Deep at 8.4 fall a tenth short of it, and Pressure on Tradition at 8.0 and The Swerve at 7.9 fall further. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.9, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 8.3. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is closed twice: by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, 8.2 against the 9.0 that Tier V requires.
Basis · a reading from knowledge of The Grapes of Wrath as released by Twentieth Century-Fox in January 1940, in black and white, Academy ratio, about 129 minutes, in English, from Tom’s walk home to Ma’s speech in the truck: directed by John Ford, produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, from a screenplay by Nunnally Johnson after John Steinbeck’s novel of 1939, photographed by Gregg Toland, edited by Robert L. Simpson, with music by Alfred Newman. One cut is in circulation, and it has been restored without alteration; the release is the object. Steinbeck’s novel is not part of the work, and the film is neither capped by it nor credited for what it merely inherits. No print, script or subtitle file was consulted. No line of dialogue is quoted; the farewell and the closing speech are given in substance. Facts that could not be verified, among them the name the film gives the government camp, how the film’s order and its last scene differ from the novel’s, the title the production worked under and the handling of its location shooting, what is left on Grampa’s grave, and finer details of shot and line, are not given.