The Grapes of Wrath

Woody Guthrie, contemporary songwriter

Guest author Dan Aloi:  Just like Tom Joad’s impassioned vow near the end of The Grapes of Wrath, as long as there is injustice and inequality, Woody Guthrie will be there. One of the Oklahoma native's songs from 1940, “The Jolly Banker,” lampoons predatory lending and is topical and socially relevant nearly 70 years later. The rock band Wilco recorded the song and and released it online May 1 on the request of Nora Guthrie, who administers her father’s archives.

Wilco’s Jeff Tweedy told NPR in April: “A couple of months ago when things really started to get hairy financially and economically for the country, that song had begun to get a little bit of attention, and she felt like somebody was going to cover it. She called us because she wanted it to be us. … It's geared towards increasing an awareness of what sometimes people miss when they're being preyed upon.”

The song is available for download for a $2 minimum donation to the Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives, at <http://www.wilcoworld.net/guthrie/index.php>
Wilco and Billy Bragg released two collaborative albums of unrecorded Guthrie songs, “Mermaid Avenue” (1998) and “Mermaid Avenue Vol. II” (2000), both well worth hearing. Bragg has said that “you’d have to go back to Walt Whitman” to find an American poet to equal Guthrie. Other artists including The Klezmatics, Blackfire and Ellis Paul have also recorded songs from the archives.

Guthrie died in 1967 of complications from Huntington’s disease, a progressive neurological disorder that prevented him from singing and playing – but not writing - for many years.
A new boxed set of recently discovered Guthrie master recordings, “My Dusty Road,” will be released Aug. 25 on Rounder Records.

Further reading, media and resources:

“Woody Guthrie: A Life” by Joe Klein (1980, Random House) – the definitive biography

“Man in the Sand” (DVD) – Chronicles the “Mermaid Avenue” project

The Woody Guthrie Foundation and Archives

Guthrie's autobiography, "Bound for Glory" (1943)

Ry Cooder sang several Dust Bowl ballads on his first two Reprise albums, “Ry Cooder” (1970) and “Into the Purple Valley” (1972). For an essay on his adaptations of the songs and the history behind them, see <http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/CoodDsBl.htm>.

“Proud to Be an Okie: Cultural Politics, Country Music, and Migration to Southern California” by Peter La Chappelle (2007, University of California Press)

Cornell CyberTower Study Room:  Woody Guthrie: His Life, Times, and Music

Hollywood in the 1930s: 1939

 

Critics and film historians agree that 1939 was “the greatest year in film history.”  Hollywood was at the apex of its Golden Age and that year saw the release of an exceptional number of movies that have come to be seen as all-time classics.  By 1939 the studio system was running like a well-oiled machine; by the end of World War II in 1945 nothing would be the same.  After the war, studios were forced to sell off their theater chains when the government came after them for creating monopolies.  In addition to that, television was on the horizon and by the 1950s the competition between them would become huge:  why pay to go to the movies when you could stay at home and watch television for free?  It would be the end of the studio system as it had been known in the Golden Age.  But in 1939, at the peak of production, there was still plenty of magic to go around.  These are only a few of the dozens of films made in 1939.

Perhaps the most ballyhooed film of 1939 was David O. Selznick’s production of Margaret Mitchell’s popular 1936 novel, “Gone With the Wind.”  It was an epic film and came to be seen as the prototype for the blockbuster.  It was the first film to get more than 6 Oscar nominations—it had 13—and of those, it won 10; a record win that stood for more than 20 years.  Over the years, “Gone With the Wind” has sold more tickets than any film in history and, with an adjustment for inflation, remains one of the top grossing films of all times.

Fantasy was a popular movie genre during the 1930s; life was harsh and Hollywood was happy to provide a vehicle for escape throughout the 30s with movies like “King Kong,” “Lost Horizon,” and “Death Takes a Holiday.”  1939’s “The Wizard of Oz” presented Dorothy’s wish to be ‘over the rainbow’ where she could escape from her everyday problems. She gets her wish, only to be confronted by a host of strange looking little people, a green-skinned witch, and a lion lacking courage before she finally realizes that her only true wish is to go home.  With its long history of being shown on television, Oz has become, perhaps, the most-watched film of all time.

Gangsters, sex symbols and big stars were also represented in the classic films of 1939:  “The Roaring Twenties” starred Jimmy Cagney and Humphrey Bogart in a story about Prohibition gangsters, and Marlene Dietrich played a sexy saloon singer to Jimmy Stewart’s cowboy in “Destry Rides Again.”  Bette Davis, fast becoming the biggest star on the Warner Brothers lot made four films in 1939—all of which are considered classics—“Dark Victory,” “Juarez,” “The Old Maid,” and “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex.”  The all star (and all female) cast of “The Women”—Joan Crawford, Norma Shearer, Paulette Goddard, Joan Fontaine, among others—was a big hit for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, as was Garbo’s “Ninotchka.”

Musicals, ever-popular during the decade, were represented by Busby Berkley’s “Babes in Arms” starring Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in “The Story of Vernon and Irene Castle.”  “Stagecoach,” known as the “perfect textbook for filmmaking,” was the breakthrough film for John Wayne and introduced the public to the spectacular vistas of Monument Valley.

Cary Grant, Victor McLaughlin and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. were at their best in the swashbuckler “Gunga Din.”  Classic novels—a traditional source for Hollywood—were brought to the screen with “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” with Charles Laughton and “Wuthering Heights,” which paired Merle Oberon and Laurence Olivier. 

In 1939 the worst of the Great Depression was behind us and Americans were looking hopefully towards the future.  It was difficult to realize that the next decade would bring an upheaval equal in magnitude to the last, that the entire world would be plunged into war, and that Hollywood would be irrevocably changed and the Golden Age of film ended.

Hollywood in the 1930s: The Stars

When silent films first appeared there were no stars and actors were unacknowledged—film makers were afraid that if the actors became too popular, they would demand higher wages.  Eventually, audiences became enamored of certain actors, began writing to studios to ask who they were, and the star system was born.  The first “star” was simply known as “The Biograph Girl” (named for the studio where she worked) and only later became known by her actual name:  Florence Lawrence.

By the 1930s, the star system in Hollywood was in full swing and studios were in the business of creating stars to draw audiences to their films.  Lucille LeSueur started making films during the silent era and was re-christened “Joan Crawford,” a name chosen by a contest in the Movie Weekly magazine.  She came to epitomize what a Hollywood star was supposed to be, and at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, who professed to have “more stars than there are in the heavens,” she was in her element.  Crawford enjoyed a long career and if you have only seen her in movies like “Whatever Happened to Baby Jane,” you should definitely check out her work in the 1930s in films like “Possessed,” “Dancing Lady,” and “The Women” to assess the arc of her career from the time she was known as “the first queen of the movies.”

In 1932, the Motion Picture Herald began charting the top box office stars of the year.  For the first two years the top Hollywood star was actress Marie Dressler.  A major figure on the stage in the early 1900s and a veteran of vaudeville and silent films, she became popular with audiences because they admired her naturalism and saw themselves in her.  The studio was somewhat baffled as to what to do with her when they found this hot box office property on their hands; she was not young and glamorous, but was, effectively, an old lady.  She found her niche in character and dramatic roles, and died in 1934 at the top of her profession.

The top box office draw for four years at the height of the Depression was Shirley Temple.  Though critics have said that if you’ve seen one of her films, you’ve seen them all, she was immensely popular with the public and literally saved her studio from bankruptcy.  She became an American icon.  Here she is singing one of her trademark songs, “Animal Crackers in My Soup” from “Curly Top.”  (You'll notice Jane Darwell who played Ma Joad in the film version of "The Grapes of Wrath" at the beginning of the clip.) 

Perhaps the most iconic star to come out of the 1930s was the ethereally beautiful Greta Garbo. She was aloof, mysterious, and had a spell-binding presence in tragedies such as “Camille,” and “Anna Karenina,” and was not above parodying herself in the comedy “Ninotchka.”  Look at the final scene in “Camille” with co-star Robert Taylor to get an idea of her screen presence.   

Running a close second to Shirley Temple, and appearing on the list for the entire decade was Clark Gable.  If most of the female movie stars of the 1930s were glamorous and stunningly beautiful, most of the male movie stars were virile and heroic.  Women idolized Gable, men admired him.  When he removed his shirt in “It Happened One Night” and was seen to be not wearing an undershirt, t-shirt sales plummeted.  Appearing in films like “Red Dust,” “San Francisco,” “Manhattan Melodrama,” and “Dancing Lady,” he appeared with all the top female stars of the era: Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford, Myrna Loy and Jeanette MacDonald and many others.  He was such a draw that theaters sometime ignored the film title completely and just put “Gable” up on the marquee.  This is the iconic hitchhiking scene from “It Happened One Night” with Claudette Colbert.   

Other popular male stars of the decade included Gary Cooper who appeared in “The Lives of a Bengal Lancer,” “Mr. Deeds Goes to Town,” and “Beau Geste.”  Wallace Beery who was often paired with Marie Dressler as in the popular “Min and Bill,” was also seen in “The Big House,” and “The Champ.”  Jimmy Cagney, who we looked at in the Gangsters section, was also very popular throughout the 1930s.

Hollywood in the 1930s: The Sex Sirens

Prior to 1934 many films were pretty racy for their time.  Various scandals in Hollywood during the 1920s created a frenzy in the tabloids and aroused the conservative elements of the nation who were concerned about family values and the portrayal of vice–topics that have continued to be heated down to this day.  Jean Harlow, known as the “Blonde Bombshell,” was the earliest and most popular of the sex symbols–the 1930s incarnation of Marilyn Monroe.  Her films like “Red-Headed Woman” and “Red Dust” were pivotal in the movement for cleaning up the movies.  This clip from “Red Dust” will give you some idea of what was considered risque at the time.  Harlow was a gifted comedienne but was, by 1937, dead from kidney disease for which there was, at that time, no treatment.

Another sex goddesses of the period was Mae West who had created several scandals with her stage plays even before she reached the screen. She continued to be quite outrageous in the movies mainly because she was the first woman to write her own film scripts, though her brand of sexual innuendo was basically finished by the mid-1940s. Her hourglass figure harkened back to the 1890s and films like “I’m No Angel” and “She Done Him Wrong” showed off her trademark use of the double entendre and innuendo. (“I see a man in your life…” “What? Only one?” and the oft misquoted “Come up sometime, and see me.”)

Paramount attempted to market Marlene Dietrich as their answer to MGM’s Greta Garbo but the only thing in common between the two was that they were both European.  Dietrich had a simmering sexuality that burned up the screen.  There was a European sophistication and sexual ambiguity that audiences were drawn to and her huge international success in “The Blue Angel” brought her to the attention of American audiences and secured her a contract at Paramount.  She came with her Svengali, director Josef von Sternberg, and between 1930 and 1935 together they made her most memorable films.  Look at my personal favorite, “Shanghai Express,” to see what I mean.

Hollywood in the 1930s: The Gangsters

Tom Joad tells the trucker that picks him up hitchhiking that he’s been in jail for homicide:  “That’s a big word—means I killed a guy.”  The early 1930s saw the advent of the gangster film, populated by a group of cocky tough guys, many of them with the same attitude as Joad—and worse—and often based on criminals of the day.  These films mirrored what was happening in the real world where the prohibition of the sale of alcohol in the United States, which was in effect from 1919 to 1933, gave rise to a new class of criminal.  At the same time, many criminals adopted the characteristics of these movie gangsters much in the same way that criminals today have adopted the language and habits of movie and TV gangsters like those in “The Godfather” and “The Sopranos.” 

The film gangsters in pre-code Hollywood were tough, violent and amoral.  The first of the genre, “Little Caesar” made a star of Edward G. Robinson in 1930.  It chronicles the rise of Caesar Enrico Bandello from the gutter to mob boss and ends with his eventual downfall.  He was, from the start, power hungry and ambitious, killing off anyone who betrayed him.  In the end, taunted by the police, he’s gunned down, muttering the classic line “Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Rico?” 

The following year saw the release of “The Public Enemy” with James Cagney.  It was another star-making vehicle.  Cagney was short, tough and popular with the working class audience that Warner Brothers was trying to attract.  His character, Tom Powers, unlike Little Caesar, killed for enjoyment while jockeying for position as top bootlegger as well as romancing both Jean Harlow and Mae Clark—two ladies of dubious character themselves.  After single-handedly gunning down a rival mob, Powers is forced to admit that he’s not so tough after all.

1932’s “Scarface” was a story loosely-based on the life of gangster Al Capone.  Subtitled “The Shame of a Nation,” Paul Muni’s portrayal of gangster Tony Camonte was such a violent depiction of gang warfare and the glorification of the gangster lifestyle that it was held up by censors for a year before being released.  Added to the violence was the incestuous undertone in the relationship between Tony and his sister Francesca, both of whom, in the end, go down in a rain of bullets.  “Scarface” was remade in 1983 starring Al Pacino and was also notable for its violence and amorality.

By 1935 the Production Code was in place and the indictment of gang violence was complete.  The glorification of crime and criminals gave way to the war against crime and most gangster films were shown from the perspective of law enforcement.  There was still violence to be seen but the anti-violence rules of the Production Code were less stringent for films with a law-and-order message.

Hollywood in the 1930s

During the 1930s anyone going to the movies would be hard-pressed to know that the nation was in the throes of a world-wide Depression.  The product produced by the various Hollywood studios–Warner Brothers, Paramount, Universal, RKO, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as well as a number of smaller studios–was purely escapist.  In fact, the Hollywood industry came to be known as the “dream factory” and those dreams were calculated to transport filmgoers from their mundane lives into another world where mere mortals became god and goddesses to an adoring public.  And they became very successful at it.  At the height of the Depression 85 million people a week went to the movies, generally paying an admission fee of twenty-five cents (a shiny dime for kids), and most of them went more than once a week.

Movies were big business.  Most of the major studios also owned a string of movie theaters (many, indeed, were movie “palaces” like this one shown in the New York Sun, the Loews’ 175th Street, built in 1930--opulent beyond description), thereby guaranteeing a venue for their product.  Those studios that didn’t own their own theater chain made distribution deals with studios that did to make sure that their product reached the screen.  Almost every major studio faced the economic problems that plagued the rest of the nation.  The studio system was hit hard in the early 1930s by the economic downturn in the country while they were in the expensive process of converting their infrastructure from producing silent films to making sound films.  They managed to weather the economic storm and this period has become known as Hollywood’s Golden Era, culminating in 1939, a year that critics and historians agree brought some of the finest films ever made to the screen.  But what were audiences actually watching?  For the next few days we’re going to look at who and what was coming out of Hollywood during the 1930s.

The Grapes of Wrath on film

The Grapes of Wrath was so popular when it was published in 1939 that Hollywood immediately made a film version that was released the following year. Nominated for seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, it won Oscars for Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Jane Darwell, who played Ma Joad, and Best Director honors for John Ford. Readers of this book should see this film.  You can watch the DVD or you can share this experience when you get to campus.

Cornell Cinema will be showing a 35mm archival copy of the film on Wednesday, August 26 at 7 pm in the Willard Straight theater. Stuart Y. McDougal, a local, retired film professor will introduce the screening.

BTW Steinbeck is a hot topic this summer. Check out the new August issue of Vanity Fair and see their Grapes of Wrath photo shoot. You can also catch a number of Steinbeck films on Turner Classic Movies this summer.

We'll be looking at the movies of the 1930s all this week with guest author, Michael Busch, from the Provost's Office. Go get some popcorn.

 

The GPS of Wrath

 

"Highway 66 is the main migrant road. 66--the long concrete path across the country, waving gently up and down on the map, from Mississippi to Bakersfield--over the red lands and the gray lands, twisting up into the mountains, crossing the Divide and down into the bright and terrible desert, and across the desert to the mountains again, and into the rich California valleys....66 is the mother road, the road of flight." --The Grapes of Wrath (p. 118)

We can read the The Grapes of Wrath from multiple perspectives--as literature, as a sociological or political study, or as an economic report on the poverty of the 1930s. We can also listen to the music it contains or view the art that it inspired. And we can look at its geography.

The Grapes of Wrath is a road book. It is an odyssey.

Boris Michev and Nij Tontisirin, from Olin Library's Map & Geospatial Information department, have created a Google Map that traces the Joad family's journey from Oklahoma to California along Route 66. Now you can better visualize the locations and see the distances covered in the book. And the shaded areas show the parts of the country that were damaged by the wind and soil erosion of the Dust Bowl.

Note: The Map staff will continue to add data to this map through the rest of the summer, and for those of you who want to create your own customized Google Maps, they will be offering NeoGeography workshops like the one listed here in the Fall semester.

Cornell's Grapes of Wrath Map

 

 

Dust Bowl Songs pt. 4

 

Guest author Steve Pond:  One song that Steinbeck couldn’t have known is “Tom Joad,” a song Woody Guthrie wrote after seeing the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, starring Henry Fonda as Joad.

Wherever little children are hungry and cry,
Wherever people ain't free.
Wherever men are fightin' for their rights,
That's where I'm a-gonna be, Ma.
That's where I'm a-gonna be.

Guthrie recalls how he came to compose “Tom Joad.”  First published in a column he wrote for People’s World, the reminiscence was republished in his anthology, Woody Sez (1975).  “The Grapes of Wrath, you know is about us pullin’ out of Oklahoma and Arkansas, and down south, and a driftin’ around over state of California, busted, disgusted, down and out, and a lookin’ for work.”  “Shows you how come us to be that a way,” he continues. “Shows the dam bankers men that broke us and the dust that choked us, and comes right out in plain old English and says what to do about it.” 

Pete Seeger, in The Incompleat Folksinger (1972), adds to the picture.  RCA Victor had just contracted with Guthrie to record an album of Dust Bowl songs – it would include such important songs as “Dust Bowl Refugees,” “Dusty Old Dust (So Long, It’s Been Good To Know Yuh),” “Pretty Boy Floyd,” and “Blowin’ Down That Old Dusty Road (Goin’ Down the Road Feelin’ Bad).”  (Originally published as Dust Bowl Ballads, vols. 1 and 2, the songs were later reissued on Rounder Records, CD-1040.)  Having just seen the film version of The Grapes of Wrath, Guthrie:

went along to the place I was staying – six flights walking up – on East Fourth Street. The friend I was staying with [Jerry Oberwager] said, ‘Sure, you can use my typewriter.’  Woody had a half-gallon jug of wine with him, sat down and started typing away. He would stand up every few seconds and test out a verse on his guitar and sit down and type some more. About one o’clock my friend and I got so sleepy we couldn’t stay awake. In the morning we found Woody curled up on the floor under the table; the half gallon of wine was almost empty and the completed ballad was sitting near the typewriter.  And it is one of his masterpieces. It’s a long song – about six minutes – and it compresses the whole novel into about twenty verses. It doesn’t cover every detail, but it gets an awful lot of them. 
 

Dust Bowl Songs and The Grapes of Wrath - pt. 3

 

Guest author Steve Pond: Although the first three songs mentioned in the Steinbeck passage (p. 199) can be identified (even tentatively), the last two present bigger identification problems.  “Jesus Calls Me To His Side” does not appear by that title in any hymnal I’ve found.  However, the title seems plausible as a hymn or spiritual song, so much so that we almost believe we’ve heard it.  It is possible that Steinbeck was familiar with the Wartburg Hymnal for Church, School, and Home, published in 1918.  There, the phrase lies embedded in the hymn, “There Is a Kingdom of the Lord”:

And Jesus calls me to His side
“I am thy Lord and Savior;
Thou art redeemed and shall abide
Forever in My favor.”

Whether or not derived from this hymnal, the notion of Jesus calling the singer to His side would have been a comforting one.

“McAlester Blues” is less clear. From the unusual spelling of McAlester, the song must refer to McAlester, Oklahoma – probably to the Oklahoma State Penitentiary there, where Tom Joad has spent four years as the book begins.  However, I have not been able to locate a “McAlester Blues” in any variant of the spelling. No matter; merely by joining together the words “McAlester” and “Blues” Steinbeck brings us an involuntary shudder.  Yet, in the context of a campfire sing, the ominous shadow is kept slightly at bay. This is, after all, one of the qualities of the blues, generally; to call hard times by name, to sing the blues, is to grapple with them. 

[Image: McAlestor Prison. From the Oklahoma Historical Society's Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History & Culture.]