The Grapes of Wrath.

Directed by John Ford; screenplay by Nunnally Johnson based on the novel by John Steinbeck; starring Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell and John Carradine. DVD, B&W, 129 mins. A 20th Century Fox Studio Classics release.

The Grapes of Wrath is one of those classic American movies that seem to capture the temper of an exact moment in time: in this case, a moment of weariness yet resolve at the close of a decade of Depression, and a moment just before the country's attention turned to the larger problems of the world. John Steinbeck's novel was published in 1939, and the film was released in January 1940, which even in the studio era represented an extremely quick transit time from page to screen. Whatever the movie's faults, its sense of immediacy remains. It's there in the faces of the extras in the migrant camps, in the Route 66 signs guiding the Joad family on their journey from Oklahoma to California, and in the parched earth that sends them on their quest for this land of promise.

In terms of image, it's difficult to imagine a better homevideo presentation of The Grapes of Wrath than that found in 20th Century Fox Studio Classics' new DVD edition. The digital restoration does full justice to director John Ford's visual lyricism, which perhaps found its most eloquent expression in the hands of director of photography Gregg Toland. The DVD's excellent contrast range allows one to fully appreciate Toland's rich, deep blacks, the silhouetted figures against the landscape, and the pinpoint of eye light that makes the characters seem to burn with an inner fire of anger and strength. Though the reputation of hardly anyone associated with The Grapes of Wrath needs burnishing, this DVD should at least remind viewers that Toland did a lot of miraculous work in his career besides Citizen Kane.

The outlines of Steinbeck's story are well known to most high-school English students. Driven off the land they've sharecropped for generations by the forces of Dust Bowl drought and 1930s economics, the Joads load all of their possessions onto a rickety truck--which, not coincidentally, calls to mind a pioneer wagon--and head west, to seek advertised work in the fertile fields of California's agricultural belt. But once there, the family encounters dehumanizing hostility and derision, and blatant wage-slashing by the big farm bosses looking for ever-cheaper labor. (Giving Grapes of Wrath contemporary relevance is one's awareness of how this process has continued, largely with undocumented alien workers rather than Steinbeck's Okies.) Outraged by the injustice around him, eldest son Tom (indelibly played in the film by Henry Fonda) determines to take up the banner of the oppressed, while Ma load (Jane Darwell) mainly strives to keep what remains of her disintegrating family together.

However naively elucidated, Steinbeck's message was undeniably socialistic, and it is remarkably undiluted in the film version. This may be surprising coming from the studio of an antilabor executive like Darryl F. Zanuck, but the producer also longed for the prestige afforded by social protest films. And while The Grapes of Wrath wasn't the only movie articulating sentiments that got a lot of people into trouble ten years down the road, it put forward its arguments with an intriguing blend of despair and hope. The film was meant by Ford and Johnson to end with Tom's famous scene of leave-taking from Ma, a bittersweet moment if there ever was one. Zanuck imposed a slightly more upbeat ending, in which Ma delivers her "We keep a comin'; we're the people that live" speech, but still, the conclusion is fraught with uncertainty and no little amount of fear. If there is any doubt of this, one glance at actor Russell Simpson's face as Pa load listens to his hardier wife declaim will put it to rest.

Of course, Steinbeck's considerably grimmer ending, which is nonetheless powered by the conviction that, as Tom puts it, "A fellow ain't got a soul of his own, just a little piece of one big soul," could not be filmed. In the novel, the loads suffer flood, starvation, and the stillborn delivery of daughter Rosasharn's baby. Coming upon a dying man, Rosasharn, who remains an undefined character in the movie, offers him her full breasts to nurse. The filmmakers also reordered the author's narrative somewhat, so that the humane government-run Wheat Patch Camp (an actual site, used in the movie) comes at a later point to establish a more optimistic trajectory. But despite such changes says DVD commentator and Steinbeck scholar Susan Shillingaw, the author was gratified by how closely the movie adhered to the book's spirit.

Shillingaw shares the commentary with critic Joseph McBride, and the pair are a good match from a historical standpoint, with one filling in information where the other's expertise leaves off. Shillingaw is excellent on the California agricultural context, while McBride, who has written two books about Ford, picks up on recurring themes and obsessions in fine director's films, from the loss of home to the indignation over injustice. He says that the loads' plight carried strong echoes for Ford of his ancestors' suffering during the nineteenth-century Irish potato famine, and of their subsequent immigration to America. Though it is good to hear Shillingaw and McBride discuss their subjects' complicated political evolutions (Steinbeck was a lifelong liberal who later denounced communism, while Ford seems to have become far more conservative over the years), things get a little out of hand when they start bickering over whether Steinbeck supported the Vietnam War. For five minutes or more they argue, while on screen the death of an important character, John Carradine's firebrand preacher-turned-organizer Casey, goes by without comment.

Such is the scattershot nature of DVD commentaries, which only rarely seem to strike a perfect balance between historical context, esthetic analysis, and gossip. I could have done with more of McBride's canny observations about Ford's art--about the way in which the director withheld close-ups and camera movement, for instance, so that when he finally employed such techniques, they packed a punch. One of the elements that make the Joads' entrance into the first migrant camp so strong, he points out, is the uncharacteristic use of subjective camera tracking. McBride is also great on providing information about the often-unbilled bit players--like D.W. Griffith heroine Mae Marsh, who shows up in the migrant camp scene--that are such an unforgettable part of the film's fabric.

Watching with Shillingaw and McBride's nonstop commentary does offer one the experience of viewing The Grapes of Wrath almost as a silent film. Concentrating on the images tends to increase the movie's power. Jane Darwell's Oscar-winning performance is marred by her cloying line readings, and while it's somewhat toned down here, Ford's penchant for knockabout rural humor is another element that hasn't worn well. Neither is as bothersome with the sound turned low. And sound isn't needed to respond to, say, the half-crazed anguish of John Qualen as a dispossessed farmer, or the shot of hungry children scrambling on a garbage dump, looking for a stick to hold a scrap from Ma Joad's stew pot.

So potent are such sequences that they put to shame the posed and jauntily scored Fox Movietone newsreels about the Dust Bowl that are offered up as extras. (The other major special feature is a ho-hum A&E Biography profile of Zanuck.) Though it suffers from moments of phoniness--for example, the studio sets really stick out amidst the film's location scenes, and the New Deal idealization of the Wheat Patch Camp is a bit much--The Grapes of Wrath is an authentic American classic, as enduring as the working people it celebrates. This great-looking DVD allows one to appreciate it all over again.