Documentary News Letter (1940)

12 DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER MAY 1940 TWO FILMS OF THE MONTH STEINBECK ON THE SCREEN IH IMPLICIT IN every novel that John Steinbeck has written is a criticism of the way people think about the world. Ever since the ancients said that Truth, Beauty and Goodness were ideas laid up in heaven, men have kept them outside reality. They were ideas living only in men's minds, pale likenesses of which they recognise from time to time in the small achievements of this world. The good people, the true men, the beautiful things of this world are only pale shadows of what might be, shadows of the ideas men carry in their minds. Steinbeck thinks that all this is nonsense. He denies that goodness is a vague ideal with a capital G in the stained glass window of men's minds. A generation ago the power of good was conventionalised in the unearthly stranger in the Passing of the Third Floor Back. Steinbeck refuses to conventionalise. For him, goodness is the truck driver buying candy for the kids. The truck driver is just as much a part of a dramatic device as the stranger but the symbolism is inverted. The old way was to abstract a quality and set up a character who was nothing else. Hence we got perfect heroes, dyed-in-the-wool villains, impeccable heroines — virtues and vices personified, figures as brittle as they were unreal. Invert this as Steinbeck does and you get something different. Make the act of decency the example, the symbol. Look among real men for an example of a man being good — even good for just one minute in his life. Instead of goodness personified, you have persons being sometimes good, and these moments can be the growing points of your drama. Steinbeck finds his America in 140 million people, capable of good and evil, who spend their time looking for better ways of doing things, ways with less suffering and less injustice, people who are searching for freedom, for comfort, for happiness. He never goes near the White Dome in Washington, or the New York Exchange ; he goes up and down the Salinas Valley or along the Federal Highway from Oklahoma to California seeking the real quality of the United States in the people doing their jobs, trying to do their jobs or wanting to have a try. This is the background from which comes Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, two Steinbeck novels made into films. Of Mice and Men is shot through with what we have called inverted symbolism. It is the story of George and Lennie. George is the typical migratory worker who travels the States, works for a while in a job, draws his pay, spends it, and then takes another job. This week he will be digging a ditch, next week taking in the harvest, but one day he will own a piece of land and settle down. One time he won't spend his pay; he'll save it. One time he won't move on ; he will be home on his own patch of land. Lennie is a half wit. He is a large lump of a fellow with the mind of a child. He is George's pal. They travel together. George looks after Lennie. Don't ask him why. He has just got that bit in him. George is complex enough to allow that he looks after Lennie. But Lennie is the simplest thing on earth. He is real enough and the pathetic reality of his half-witted desire to tend rabbits, to collect pieces of soft velvet, to pet birds makes him a symbol of all the simple longings of the world. Lennie and George have a plan. They are going to save their pay. They are going to have a place of their own. They will work for themselves and Lennie will tend the rabbits. They come to work on a farm. They live in the bunk house and they work in the fields. Candy, the old keeper of the bunk house, has a dog. It is old and helpless. He pets it as Lennie pets his velvet, his mouse and anything else he can get to pet. Candy also looks after this old helpless dog as George looks after Lennie. But the old dog would be better dead so Candy lets himself be talked into having it shot. He lets'the thing he loves be killed. Lennie too kills the things he loves. This great half-witted giant kills when he pets. His caress kills the mouse he pets, his playful blow kills his pup, he loses his piece of velvet. And when Lennie kills the boss's wife just because he wanted to pet her hair, George has to shoot Lennie just as Candy ought to have shot his dog and not let another man do it. Steinbeck's novel was nearly all dialogue. To make it into a play he had only to rearrange the dialogue. To make it into a film might have seemed no more difficult. But the poetry of the book is so finely strung, the character of Lennie so terrifyingly simple, the character of George so complex that to recreate all this in pictures of actuality must have seemed to a sensitive director like unweaving the rainbow. Perhaps the biggest compliment one can pay Lewis Milestone is to say that his direction is not noticeable when you see this film for the first time. It takes a second viewing to put the story in the background and to appreciate the skill of the direction, the superb timing of the situations, the mastery of camera movement that puts Milestone among the few big-timers in cinema. The second time through you notice particularly his imaginative use of sound — fingers drumming on a table-top, cutlery clattering at mealtime. The cutting is by Bert Jordan, cutter of Laurel and Hardy comedies, which are among the best edited films from America. Aaron Copland's music contributes a great deal to create the atmosphere with which both the book and the play were charged. Hal Roach has made a spectacular entry as a producer of serious films. When it became known that The Grapes of Wrath was to be made into a film, reactionary pressure groups in the United States tried to stop the production. The notion was that The Grapes of Wrath was not a compliment to the Sunny ilve 00' State of California nor a bouquet to the bigshots of Oklahoma. In fact the whole project was considered a bit un-American. It was bad enough for a man to make a best-seller out of the true story of the dispossessed farmers of Oklahoma, but to turn it into a film was a bit thick. Yet the point for posterity and for many people living right now is not that The Grapes of Wrath is the truth about a section of the population in the United States, important though that may be, but that it is a faithful picture of people in search of human decency. A search that other communities will recognise. And, in The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck's characters are constantly successful, but not in great big blinding flashes, nor in great achievements of the intellect, nor in dream journeys to the end of the rainbow where lay Lennie's patch of land. The Joads find decency bit by bit. Somehow it doesn't all hang together, but there was that little bit yesterday and this little bit today and may be that's the way the world is made. The Joads are an Oklahoma family who have been born, have lived and some of them died in their farm. One day they find that the farm no longer belongs to them. Dust, bad harvest, mortgage ; and the farm belongs to "the company" or "the bank" — something without a face. You can't go gunning for a bank or punch a company in the jaw. The tractor which runs over their land and knocks down their house is real enough and the man who drives it has a face, but you can't punch it because it belongs to the man next door J " and he is doing this for three dollars a day. His soil failed too. So the Joads take to the road, the road to California, where there is work for all, or so the placards say. But there are ten placards for every job and a hundred men for every placard. The journey is one of day to day despair and the full measure of human decency, assembled from its little pieces, is always over the horizon. There is no end to it so the film has no end. And that too provides evidence that little bits of decency still remain to be gathered from the wayside. John Ford directs and while he has not time even in two hours twenty minutes to let all Steinbeck's characters develop, he faithfully paints the essence of the book on the screen. Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad the son on parole, Jane Darwell the mother who holds the family together, and John Carradine the preacher. All play well and help Ford to put America in its shirt sleeves. The small part players are as real as wet paint and do justice to Steinbeck's observation and to his recreation of the real language of rripn. If we must label this picture then it is a tragedy. It is an account of despair, of death, of corruption ; but also it is the fight of ordinary decent folk for life in their own terms. It is true that this fight is never won, but it is also true that it is never lost ; and that in itself is the victory.