The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
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.
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What critics compared The Grapes of Wrath to
The first hour is a prairie home exposition, a soft combination of "The Road" and "The Grapes of Wrath."
Astronauts Matthew McConaughey and Anne Hathaway journey to a distant galaxy on a desperate mission to save humanity in this brainy, heartfelt, gorgeous and flawlessly acted sci-fi epic — inspired by “2001: A Space Odyssey,’’ “Close Encounters of the Third Kind’’ and less likely sources such as “The Grapes of Wrath.’’
Often, Christopher Nolan’s ambitious film, which looks like the Dust Bowl evacuation scenes in “The Grapes of Wrath” one minute and the eerily blank vistas of “2001: A Space Odyssey” the next, also seems to be trying to reconcile competing impulses.
Juggling the ricocheting notions of the theory of relativity, the metaphysical meditations of 2001: A Space Odyssey, the symphonic connectivity of The Tree of Life, and the Dust Bowl doom of The Grapes of Wrath, and filming it with a giant Imax camera - Nolan's Interstellar is a feat not to be taken lightly.
Many of Interstellar's finest moments are familiar; visual allusions to The Grapes of Wrath and Field of Dreams, and of course Kubrick's 2001, including TARS, a robot shaped like a walking monolith, with Bill Irwin wisecracking about ejecting someone through an airlock.
Ambitious and grand in scope, it is, in a way, a modern version of "The Grapes of Wrath" in which the dust bowlers go into outer space rather than to California - with comparable disappointment.
This is unashamedly heroic film-making in the mold of the John Ford of "The Grapes of Wrath" and "My Darling Clementine," with perhaps a taste of Sergio Leone.
The three films it suggests most consistently are “The Grapes of Wrath,” “Salt of the Earth” and the 1963 Italian film “The Organizer”; the last shot of “Matewan"--consciously or not--almost directly echoes “The Organizer’s” final shot.
It`s myth without the mythic lift that John Ford brought to ''The Grapes of Wrath,'' or King Vidor to ''Our Daily Bread.''
Amid all these layers is a beautifully complex character portrait of Reinke, and as the film intensifies its focus on the preacher, it ventures from very good into masterpiece territory, evoking thoughts of Steinbeck’s “The Grapes of Wrath.”
A scenario with present-day echoes of “The Grapes of Wrath” yields perceptive insights into the way we view outsiders.
***½ A prize-winner at numerous film festivals last year (including Sundance), director Jesse Moss’ gripping documentary has been described as a 21st-century “The Grapes of Wrath,” but its plot twists are of the type that might have caused Tom Joad to hightail it back to Oklahoma: Some of the job-seeking migrants depicted here prove to be meth addicts and convicted sex offenders, revelations that tax the patience of progressive pastor Jay Reinke, a Lutheran minister who has opened his heart and his church to the homeless men pouring into Williston, North Dakota, in search of jobs in the expanding “fracking” fields.
The opening sequence is one for the ages, a deliberately paced mother-daughter fight that involves both women tearing up to “The Grapes of Wrath” on tape followed by a sudden, violent punchline that conveys the essence of the movie in a matter of minutes: smart, edgy, and unpredictable just when you think you’ve figured it out.
In the opening scene, the two of them listen to The Grapes of Wrath on tape in the car, weeping openly.
(At one point we watch them tooling along in the family car listening to an audiobook of The Grapes of Wrath—talk about California illusions.)
After sharing tears over an audio version of "The Grapes of Wrath," Marion says "let's just sit with what we've heard," with Lady Bird coming back with "Are you serious?"
One moment, mother and daughter are tight, weeping in the car over an audio book of The Grapes of Wrath (!); the next, Marion has turned on Lady Bird, pouring all her anxiety and self-doubt into her daughter’s head to the point where the girl throws herself out of the moving car.
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This about as American a story as you can imagine, and Chung — who wrote the screenplay — deftly bypasses cliches and still recalls all the great, tough films in this category from “The Grapes of Wrath” to “Days of Heaven.”
It reverses the basic American migration story, seen in such movies as The Grapes of Wrath (1940), Lost Boundaries (1949), and even The Dollmaker (1984).
"The Road," by John Hillcoat, who directed the grim Australian Western "The Proposition," is an apocalyptic "The Grapes of Wrath," in which Man and Boy push a shopping cart filled with their few possessions across a parched earth toward an unknown.
Hillcoat combines minimalism with classical rhythms here – drawing from films such as The Grapes of Wrath and Bicycle Thieves.
Laszlo Kovacs's black-and-white photography doesn't recall some nice little studio picture but "The Grapes of Wrath" with its gigantic, sorrowful landscapes.
The two kinds of Depression-era movies we remember best are the ones that ignored the Depression altogether and the ones like “ The Grapes of Wrath ” that took it as a subject.
No, its not the great Depression and this is not The Grapes of Wrath.
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(Director/actor Sinise unquestionably has an affinity for Steinbeck: he's staged a successful adaptation of Of Mice and Men at his Chicago Steppenwolf Theatre, as well as an ambitious Broadway production for The Grapes of Wrath, the writer's most famous -- and subversive -- work.)
Meanwhile, mama Bates breaks out of sitcom mold for a late scene of Really Serious Acting, as if suddenly doing Ma Joad in “The Grapes of Wrath.”