It's probably a good idea to watch this film every time we have a presidential election to remind us that the issues we face now have been with us for ages -- and on film for at least three-quarters of a century. The Grapes of Wrath, John Ford's masterful retelling of John Steinbeck's 1939 classic novel, documents one family's struggle to survive during what is arguably our country's harshest and most protracted ecological disasters.

The Dust Bowl of the 1930s was the result of massive drought, ill-advised farming practices, and rapid mechanization. Farmers in the plains states, many of them sharecroppers, were forced off blighted land, homes destroyed by savage storms, and bank foreclosures. Steinbeck's novel documented not only the plight of displaced families searching for work, but also the exploitation and abuses they suffered at the hands of corporate farmers, banks, and politicians.

The first half of the film follows the book pretty closely: young Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) heads home to his family farm having just been paroled from prison for an unspecified murder. On the way, he comes across an old acquaintance, Jim Casy (John Carradine), a fallen preacher. They continue together to the Joad farm and find the family and most of the neighbors gone and their homes abandoned. The land has dried up, the banks have foreclosed, and the homes have been condemned. Tom learns that his family -- Ma (​Jane Darwell), Pa (Russell Simpson, a John Ford regular), and his siblings -- are at his uncle's place preparing to leave for California where there is work to be had picking fruit, or so it says on this here yeller flyer. Thus reunited, the whole clan sets off on Route 66 for, literally, greener pastures.

 Along the way they learn from migrants who have been on the road longer that opportunities aren't as plentiful as promised by the yellow flyer. The Joads come across Okie encampments filled with families who've been out of work for months and whose children are starving. Jobs present themselves in fits and for low wages. The Joads are offered an opportunity to pick peaches at a ranch that provides cabins for the workers and a store where they can buy supplies. Unbeknownst to them, the family are strike-breaking at half-wages and what little money they make must be spent at a "company store" (a time-honored, American tradition) where low wages buy groceries at inflated prices.

Once Tom learns of the strike, he sneaks out of the camp to a workers' meeting. The group is raided by deputies and in the ensuing scuffle, Casy is killed by one guard and Tom kills another while trying to protect his friend. The Joads leave under cover of darkness to keep from being found out. Eventually, they come to a New Deal camp, where the younger Joad children discover indoor plumbing and Ma is reacquainted with normal social conventions, like manners. The camp is kept orderly and clean by the workers, who organize themselves and social activities. Just as things are looking up for the family, deputies close in on Tom who decides he must run off to protect his family from further aggravation.

Ma, whose sole mission this entire picture has been to keep the family together, is unhappy about this development, but she understands. This is Tom's second murder, after all, and he assures her that he will devote his life to helping the little guy against the powerful and corrupt. Tom thus departs in one direction while what's left of his family (spoiler: not everyone makes it and I left out some players) heads off in another. Pa apologizes to Ma for not being stronger; for looking backwards on better times. Ma tells him that all of this has made her less afraid, because:

And in spite of the massive beating they've taken, she is sure that they'll be fine, because they're "the people that live" and will go on forever.

​The book is distinctly more critical than the film of the capitalist excesses (union-busting goons, company stores, police brutality) and it ends on a much bleaker note, but the notoriously conservative John Ford managed to convey the terrible conditions faced by migrant workers while offering a glimmer of hope at the film's end. Before agreeing to do the film, Ford visited some of the camps described in Steinbeck's novel to make sure the author hadn't sensationalized the conditions. He discovered they were worse. Ford downplayed the book's larger pro-labor and anti-corporate themes, deciding instead to focus on one family's experience. And in the end, Ford portrayed the government as a positive force: fair, solution-oriented, and important.

I wonder if in our current political climate, where one side is concerned about migrants taking all our good fruit-picking, toilet-cleaning, and ditch-digging jobs and the other is fighting for a minimum wage that meets the current cost of living, whether we can ever have a progressive book made into a movie by a conservative director -- at all. We still have labor problems, ecological disasters (regular and man-made) and poverty, but we used to just disagree on how to solve those problems, not whether they even exist.

This post is my contribution to the Nature's Fury Blogathon, hosted by Cinematic Catharsis.

Please take a moment to read the other entries describing horrible calamities nature hath wrought.

I had never seen The Lost Patrol until the other day, when I was (belatedly) preparing for The John Ford Blogathon. Filmed in the Sonoran Desert in Imperial County, California, every long shot of this wartime drama is spectacular -- and very John Ford: a taut human conflict set against a stark, uncompromising landscape.

The picture opens with a small patrol of British soldiers riding on horseback in the Mesopotamian desert during World War I. Their new lieutenant is shot and killed by an unseen Arab sniper pretty much immediately, but as he is new, no one is particularly torn up about it until they realize that he died before telling them what their orders were or how to meet up with their brigade. The sergeant (Ford favorite, Victor McLaglen) is a veteran campaigner who quickly takes charge of the situation and leads his men northward in the hopes that they will find their larger outfit.

It's hot. It's sandy. They're lost. They know it. There are some green recruits in the company who aren't used to schlepping around foreign climates in full uniform. In spite of it all, the men are kind to each other and to the horses. There is a bit of a wet blanket in the form of a bible thumping, sad-faced man (Boris Karloff, the saddest face of all), who disapproves of the swearing and talk about drink and girls in various ports.

Max Steiner's score does rather pound these points home: the sand, the heat, the camaraderie, the disapproval, we get it, we get it. I know he was nominated for an Academy Award for this picture and everything, but if it were up to me, I'd have turned the volume down a bit in some sequences. As Bette Davis said famously during the making of Dark Victory, when her character was heading upstairs to die, "Either I'm going to climb those stairs or Max Steiner is going to climb those stairs, but I'll be god-damned if Max Steiner and I are going to climb those stairs together!" Truer words...

As luck would have it, the troop stumbles upon an oasis with date palms, fresh water, and a bit of shelter for the night. The plan is to head northward in the morning, but when they awaken, they find one sentry dead, the other mortally wounded, and all the horses gone. 

The rest of the film is pretty much a chronicle of how to die in the desert. At different times, different men say "I see something moving!" and head off into the dunes only to be shot and killed by a sniper. Two guys, one of whom is Alan Hale, are sent to try to find help, only to be returned, mutilated, on two of the stolen horses. One of 'em gets shot out of a date palm; another goes crazy from the heat; and Boris Karloff goes completely off his rocker, dresses himself up as a Babylonian with a cross for a staff and wanders into the desert and is, of course, cut down by enemy fire.

Oh yeah, an allied biplane flies over, giving the survivors a brief moment of hope, only to be shot and killed once he lands the plane, in spite of the remaining soldiers waving him back. Alas, eventually only the sergeant is left alive, and we finally see the enemy descending on him in the oasis. There are only a handful of Arabs, as he suspected all along, and he manages to cut them down as they approach.

It's a stark picture with breathtaking desert sequences. The acting is fine, if a little melodramatic, but whatever, it's 1934 and they're all on location in the Algodones Dunes. The pace is fast and engaging. If you haven't had a chance to see The Lost Patrol, it is available streaming on Vudu for a small rental fee, or available on DVD. I recommend it for trademark John Ford and a sturdy ensemble cast.