JOHN FORD Chapter 4: The Grapes of Wrath (1940, Fox), Wagon Master (1950, RKO) & Tobacco Road (1941, Fox)

As part of our The Ford Fundamentals: John Ford Director of 2022 series, founder.programmer Craig Hammill is writing an appreciation in 12 chapters, a prologue, and an epilogue across the year.

Important Note: Movies will be talked about in depth so definitely spoilers!

CHAPTER 4: Peaks & Valleys

Even John Ford, a world class moviemaker, alternated between masterpieces like The Grapes of Wrath & Wagon Master-and head-scratching misfires like Tobacco Road. Often in the same year.

Just a month ago, we showed two of Ford’s most beloved movies-1940’s adaptation of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and from 1950, Ford original story penned “little picture” Wagon Master.

The same night we showed Grapes of Wrath, we also showed the movie many consider Ford’s absolute worst (including his own wife Mary Ford), 1941’s Tobacco Road.

But one of the hidden benefits of being a contract director back in the day must have been the ability to shrug your shoulders if a picture didn’t work and not get too down or depressed about it because you would have been deep in directing the NEXT PICTURE or even the PICTURE AFTER THAT. So if you knew you had not done a great job, you did have the chance to course correct immediately and get right back on the horse.

Sometimes Ford felt a deep connection to the subject matter, as he reportedly did with The Grapes of Wrath, which he saw as the story of his own Irish family in the 1800’s having to leave their own land during the famine to come to America.

Many folks have pointed out that The Grapes of Wrath may actually be Ford’s most “Irish” picture.

Sometimes Ford would just get assigned to a project by the likes of Fox studio chief Daryl Zanuck and he’d plow through it so he could move on to a smaller or more idiosyncratic work. Such seems to be the case with Tobacco Road, a raucous low comedy about dirt poor conniving Georgia farmers (adapted from a famous Broadway play of the time) that plays at such a manic pace most find the movie equally annoying and exhausting.

Ford got the assignment almost certainly because The Grapes of Wrath, about poor Oklahoma farmers, had been such a success for the studio.

One can see Zanuck thinking-hell Ford did a great job with the material, let’s get him to do this one. It’s similar. We can capitalize on it!

Then there are the “little pictures” like Wagon Master that Ford admitted later in his career he loved to do. He would often do “one for them” like a Rio Grande (still a masterpiece of family in its own right) so he could do one for himself like Wagon Master.

Martin Scorsese has often talked about how this approach guided Scorsese’s own career in American moviemaking.

Let’s look at these three pictures and what they say about Ford the moviemaker in his time.

The Grapes of Wrath was an instant classic and has since gone on to become recognized as one of the greatest movies ever made during the classic Hollywood period.

That was not a foregone conclusion at the time.

Anyone who has read the novel knows what a minefield it must have been. The book deals with socialism, the exploitation of workers by owners, spousal abandonment, violence and rage, horrible poverty, and radicalization.

Steinbeck himself was terrified that Zanuck and Ford would get rid of the soul of the novel to make it more politically acceptable and palatable for middle America.

So no one was more surprised and pleased then Steinbeck himself when he saw the finished picture and felt that it was actually more brutal and intense than his novel. At least in his novel, Steinbeck had alternated chapters of intense suffering with chapters of the descriptive, near biblical beauty of the American landscape.

For storytelling purposes, Ford and Zanuck had to strip that all out and just focus on the pilgrim’s plight of the earnest Joad family as they suffered indignation after indignation just to survive during the Depression.

What Ford brought to the picture, what Ford brought to all of his pictures, was a deeply hidden from public view sensitivity, identification with humanity, and poetry about the human struggle to make something of existence.

Ford worked with ace cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane, The Best Years of Our Lives) here and the two of them crafted stunning and heart breaking sequences as cinematic as moviemaking has seen before or since.

And though Ford and Zanuck did tone down, or at least make more ambivalent, the most extreme radical elements of the novel, they nevertheless preserved and spotlighted the novel’s focus on how the lower and working classes are often horribly exploited in an unfair and unjust way that betrays everything we say America stands for.

So it must have been somewhat of a head-scratcher to cinephiles when Ford turned around and just a year later made Tobacco Road-a movie as zany, blasphemous, and unserious as Grapes of Wrath was somber, poetic, and politically committed.

But this writer feels that Tobacco Road is absolutely of a piece with Ford’s body of work. One only need watch the comedy in The Quiet Man, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, the Will Rogers trilogy or the Shirley Temple starrer Wee Willie Winkie, to see how Ford also loved to “take the piss” out of serious moments with low comedy (a very Irish inclination).

This writer certainly understands why most people don’t like Tobacco Road. Its comedy- which includes jokes about child marriage, spousal abuse, beating obnoxious teenagers, cheating family members out of money, sexual lust in the dust among the “white trash” Lester family-seems an almost blasphemous middle finger to the profound humanity on display in the previous year’s The Grapes of Wrath (for which Ford won his second best director Oscar).

But, and this writer blushes to admit it, the comedy is actually some of Ford’s best and certainly makes sense as a kind of relief or expression of another aspect of how families get through tough times.

This writer can certainly vouch that in his own Irish Catholic family tough times were almost always met head on with a kind of gallows humor and a “stop your whining, get on with it” dark dark comedy that certainly acted as a kind of defense mechanism from getting depressed or down.

This seems to be what Ford was trying to do in Tobacco Road. The characters, love them or hate them, certainly don’t sit around moping about their situation. And there are moments of such strange screwball comedy-specifically a running gag about how everyone stops and pretends to act respectable whenever a church hymn is sung-that do elicit a belly laugh.

NOW. . .this writer is also hopefully not delusional. Many of the performances in Tobacco Road are pitched at 11 (on a scale of 1-10) and that kind of manic approach just wears one down across a feature film. Ford, for all his talents, was never great at subtle comedy or even at sophisticated comedic levels. That would be the domain of filmmakers like Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, and Howard Hawks.

Ford’s idea of comedy was about as subtle as a wife wielding a skillet to knock the head of her drunken husband.

Still, unlike the bombs of many directors, Tobacco Road has much to recommend if one is willing to endure the annoyances. There are moments and passages of tremendous Fordian beauty (including a late walk at sunset to the “old folks home” when the Lesters think they’ve lost their farm to the bank and have nowhere else to go). And Ford is still clearly trying to give it his all.

Maybe most mysterious of all are the near “pure poetry” masterpieces of Ford like Wagon Master. Based on an original story Ford himself penned (but rarely took credit for), Wagon Master is the deceptively simple story of how an ostracized Mormon wagon train hires on two experienced leaders (played by Ben Johnson and Harry Carrey Jr) to take them to Utah.

Along the way, they pick up a lost troupe of vaudeville performers and snake oil salesman and then get endangered by an outlaw group of amoral bank robbers and murderers.

Much like Stagecoach, 11 years before it, Wagon Master almost completely swims in the river waters of humanism and tolerance. The villains of the piece are a group of entitled white men (the robber/murderers) who treat the much more honest outcasts-including women, the Mormons, and the Native Americans of the story-with entitled disdain.

A particularly shocking scene involves a Native American woman screaming after an attempted rape and the Wagon Train stringing up the White would be rapist and whipping him. A scene almost unimaginable in the heyday of the House of UnAmerican Activities.

Ford, when he would let his guard down, would admit that he made the picture because he identified with the Mormons who were often ostracized by other Americans and saw them as he saw his own Irish family. He also disliked how many “normal Americans” were hiding behind patriotism, the church & capitalism to name names and black list people in his own industry.

He cast notorious snitch Ward Bond in the role of a Mormon Elder who often delivered monologues on the need for tolerance, understanding, and acceptance as a kind of clever Ford ploy.

Wagon Master was Ford’s subtle (and when one thinks about it truly genius given the climate of the time) response to the worst inclinations he saw in the American character.

As always, in the best of Ford’s work, the seeming outcasts of society-the Mormons, the prostitutes, the actors, the Native Americans, the immigrants-are revealed to be the folks who actually truly believe in the aspirational values the seeming entitled members of society-the white male robbers-only pay lip service to for self-serving needs.

This writer doesn’t want to push this argument too far. But it shouldn’t be forgotten that looked at through the lens of its time, Wagon Master was an almost shockingly progressive movie about the country.

Here one finds a perfect middle ground between Ford’s dueling sensibilities. There are plenty of scenes of very funny comedy (including a great introduction of the traveling actors as drunk because they have to drink their own snake oil medicine as they’ve run out of water) suddenly punctuated with scenes of communal bonding, shock, struggle.

If there’s one aspect of Ford’s personality that we could all possibly learn from in this day and age it was his refusal to be “precious” about his work. He certainly took it seriously however he acted to the press.

And he certainly prepped and planned and researched and secretly worked to make it artistically great.

But he could immediately shrug off a misfire, find a better suited project, get right back on the horse, keep working, keep getting better.

Ford often said (and there’s no reason to think he was being anything less than 100% transparent) that he LOVED making movies. He wasn’t as hot on watching movies.

There’s something insightful in that approach. Do the best you can. Move on. Keep making. Keep learning. Keep working. Keep improving.

Stop your whining. Get on with it.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club