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Vidor's Our Daily Bread is a close precedent, the opening shot's geometric desolation (figure dwarfed on receding road, telegraph wires, blank sky) foresees Antonioni. Tom Joad out on parole, "trying to get along without shoving anybody," Henry Fonda between holy vagabond and clenched fist. Dispossession is an elemental crisis, ancestral earth into drifting dust, the runty sharecropper (John Qualen) grabs a despondent handful as the tractor flattens his home. (His face is a hollow jack-o'-lantern in the dilapidated cabin, "just a plain old graveyard ghost.") The Pilgrim's Progress in the Dust Bowl, a cramped jalopy along Highway 66, the Joads whittled down by hardship after hardship. "Hard-lookin' outfit" is a gas station clerk's description, Grandpa (Charley Grapewin) dies and Pa (Russell Simpson) withers but Ma (Jane Darwell) endures as an Okie Venus of Willendorf. "I'm going down the road feeling bad, I'm going down the road feeling bad..." Steinbeck's proletarian prose transmuted into John Ford's elegiac imagery, a spare expressionism woven around the erosion of family and nation. Shoebox mementos lit by Gregg Toland as disintegrating talismans, a slightly tilted subjective track for a screenful of Dorothea Lange transients. "The land of milk and honey" is more desert, penury and exploitation rule the California paradise promised by a mogul's pamphlet. (The drive through the gates of the labor ranch amid emaciated crowds and police sirens is keyed uncannily to the European situation.) The lost preacher (John Carradine) and the new faith of activism, the offhand generosity of hard-boiled waitresses, the sublime flatness of Fonda warbling "Red River Valley." The fabricated uplift of Ma's climactic peroration cannot soften the outlaw's call-to-arms trance, "I'll be all around in the dark." Significant studies follow in Italy (Rocco and His Brothers) and Brazil (Barren Lives) and India (Distant Thunder). With Dorris Bowdon, O.Z. Whitehead, Zeffie Tilbury, Frank Sully, Frank Darien, Grant Mitchell, Ward Bond, Shirley Mills, Darryl Hickman, Roger Imhof, Charles D. Brown, Kitty McHugh, John Arledge, Charles Tannen, and Paul Guilfoyle. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |