The Grapes of Wrath, the movie

Here is a film that is generally true to the text, especially in the first half of the action, but there were a couple key differences that will make fans of the novel gasp. There was no devastating flood at the end, for example, and since it was the forties, no breastfeeding of emaciated old men in barns. The ‘second-half’ sequence of events was reshuffled slightly so that the book’s happy interlude of life in the government camp was bumped to the end of the movie- to manufacture a happy ending where Steinbeck provided none.

But there are certain touching scenes that are right out of Steinbeck’s masterpiece: the kindly truckers in a Route 66 roadside diner, who leave huge tips to compensate the owners for their own kindness to the Joads, the kids’ wonder at the flushing toilets in the government camp, and the handwritten note stuffed in a jar next to the grandfather’s hastily buried body, just to name a few. The casting and acting is first-rate (except maybe for the sideshow character of Casy, who comes off as a village idiot.) In short, there’s a lot to love for Steinbeck nation.

In fact, if you thought the book was too dark and overly political, you’ll probably love the film- it’s a classic. But if you’re a literary adaptation purist, some of the changes may not sit well with you obviously. It is a gorgeous film, however, and it’s worth checking out if only to see Jane Darwell’s Oscar-winning performance as Ma Joad. (Henry Fonda is no slouch as Tom, and John Ford also took home the Oscar for best Director.) Give it a watch.

Literary Lucre

The idea of money, both the unlikely accumulation of it and the nerve racking experience of watching it run out, can be a pretty powerful thread to pull the reader through a book. It’s as universal a theme as there is. But you don’t have to read Og Mandino or Horatio Alger to see it done. Just consider these lasting images from some of our literary greats:

• The coffee can piggy bank nailed to the floor of the tenement closet in Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn – always dutifully fed, and all-too-frequently raided in times of need.
• The bags of gold buried under the brick floor in George Eliot’s Silas Marner  - which are dug up for continual counting, but disappear at the hands of a thief.
• The small stash of silver hidden away in the earthen walls of Wang Lung’s farm house in Pearl Buck’s The Good Earth – a stash that is multiplied and invested in land until it becomes the makings of a “great house”.
• The forty dollar kitty of the westward-bound Joad family in Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath - a precarious sum that keeps us on pins and needles to see whether it can get their run-down jalopy across the desert and into California.

Money can be the driving force of the story, as are the boons bestowed by Pip’s mysterious benefactor in Dickens’ Great Expectations.  It can raise the stakes of the plot, as do Bingley’s and Darcy’s fortunes in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. It can provide a mysterious back-story for a character as does Jay Gatsby’s ill-gotten wealth in Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby.  Or it can be the measure of the rise or fall of a protagonist, like those experienced by Scarlett in Margaret Mitchell’s Gone With the Wind. 

Money is something we’ve all got experience with (some more than others, to be sure) and it’s something that most of us keep a keen interest in throughout our lives. So while a good “up from nothing” story can appeal to all of us, it can be equally gripping to follow a monied protagonist- whether that’s Hank Reardon fighting to protect his wealth and his property in Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged , or whether it’s Ebenezer Scrooge finding inspiration to share his wealth in Dickens’ A Christmas Carol .

I’m looking for more great books in this vein. Do any of you have any reading recommendations to share?

The Writer's Gene

Yesterday’s post got us thinking about literary lineage. Not influence, mind you, but writers who actually beget other writers. In my five minutes of looking around, it appears to be more common than you’d think. Perhaps there’s a “writer’s gene” waiting to be isolated in the human genome project.

Take William Falkner. No, that’s not a typo. I’m talking about the author of The White Rose of Memphis , great-grandfather of the William Faulkner we all know- the one born before the family added a “u” to their name.

Or, there’s John Steinbeck… the Fourth- son of the John Steinbeck we all read in high school, journalist and posthumous memoirist. Or his brother Thomas, author of a few novels of his own, not to mention an upcoming memoir.

Hemingway’s first son, Jack, helped prepare A Moveable Feast  for posthumous publication, and himself published a memoir. Jack’s daughter Mariel has written three books of her own. Ernest's second son Patrick edited his father’s 800 manuscript pages from a trip to Africa into True at First Light , and has been good for an introduction or forward in many a Hemingway book ever since. Youngest son Greg (AKA Gloria) also authored a memoir, as have a couple of his children.

Then there's Thomas Mann, whose brother was also a writer, as were three of his children. Or the Bronte sisters for that matter. I’m sure there are tons of other examples I don’t have time to research, but it’s shockingly common. So maybe there’s something to this writing gene after all.

(That, or maybe there's a universal desire to capitalize on one’s family name when it happens to be a juicy one. I could be convinced of either.)

The Travel Narrative: In pictures

You thought I was done with this theme? Well, maybe just one more post. Here are a few literary journeys for those of you with a cartographer’s bent. 

From On the Road,  Sal Paradise’s path through the US and Mexico:

Steinbeck’s rambling jaunt from Travels with Charley:

William Least Heat Moon’s roundabout roamings in Blue Highways:

The ill-fated wanderings of  Alexander Supertramp (Chris McCandless), from Krakauer’s Into the Wild:

The Pequod’s journey on the high seas in Moby Dick:

And Phileas Fogg’s mad race across the globe in Around the World in 80 Days:

What other great literary maps are we missing?

Casting Call

One last movie-related post before I give it a rest: the obligatory author look-alike post.

Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris  (winner of best original screenplay, set at least partially in 1920s Paris) got me thinking about who I would cast in the role of certain famous writers. Here are a few suggestions just for the heck of it. Let me know what you think. (And I will cross-post this in our Forum, in case you want to add any of your own.)

This first one’s not an exact match, but there’s something in the downward slope of the eyes, the highway patrolman moustache and the slight hint of a smirk that makes me think you could do a lot worse in casting a young William Faulkner than Edward Norton Jr.:

As you can see, this second one is a surprising and uncanny likeness. A young Ernest Hemingway could be played pretty convincingly by 80s-era Charlie Sheen:

As for a youthful Ezra Pound? How about a goateed Jim Caviezel?:

For crusty, old Steinbeck, I think the obvious answer is Vincent Price:

And this last one speaks for itself. Who could possibly make a better Gertrude Stein than Joe Pesci?

Add your own here!

Learn a life skill: Read a novel

Sometimes a passage will do nothing for the plot, zip for the growth of the characters, and zilch for conveying a lasting message of any kind- but you still love it because it provides a killer description of something you'll probably never experience first-hand. In that spirit, let's let Tom Joad show us how to skin a rabbit:

Tom took up the rabbit in his hand. "One of you go get some bale wire outa the barn. We'll make a fire with some of this broken plank from the house." He looked at the dead rabbit. "There ain't nothing so easy to get ready as a rabbit," he said. He lifted the skin of the back, slit it, put his fingers in the hole, and tore the skin off. It slipped off like a stocking, slipped off the body to the neck, and off the legs to the paws. Joad picked up the knife again and cut off the head and the feet. He laid the skin down, slit the rabbit along the ribs, shook out the intestines onto the skin, and then threw the mess off into the cotton field. And the clean-muscled little body was ready.

-John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

Title Chase: The Grapes of Wrath

Yesterday we sniffed out the title of Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country. Today we do the same for John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

Why did the one book make me think of the other? Well, despite their vastly different subject matter the two books are very similar stylistically. Paton came across Steinbeck's masterpiece on the same international tour of penal institutions during which he wrote his own novel. You can trace the American writer's influence in Paton's use of a preliminary dash to offset dialogue and, as we discussed yesterday, his use of intercalary chapters to make one family's tragedy a symbolic statement about the world at large.

Steinbeck's intercalaries are some of the most interesting parts of Grapes in my view. They range from abstract descriptions of banks as insatiable monsters, to bits of dialogue set on used car lots and roadside shanty towns. They allow Steinbeck to turn the Joad familiy's plight into a broad condemnation of the Depression Era powers that be.

So where do we get the title, The Grapes of Wrath? From the heartrending descriptions of agricultural waste that have left Oakies and migrant workers like the Joads hungry and destitute:

"The works of the roots of the vines, of the trees, must be destroyed to keep up the price, and this is the saddest, bitterest thing of all. Carloads of oranges dumped on the ground. The people came for miles to take the fruit, but this could not be. How would they buy oranges at twenty cents a dozen if they could drive out and pick them up? And men with hoses squirt kerosene on the oranges, and they are angry at the crime, angry at the people who have come to take the fruit. A million people hungry, needing the fruit- and kerosene sprayed over the golden mountains. 

"And the smell of rot fills the country... 

"The people come with nets to fish for potatoes in the river, and the guards hold them back; they come in rattling cars to get the dumped oranges, but the kerosene is sprayed. And they stand still and watch the potatoes float by, listen to the screaming pigs being killed in a ditch and covered with quicklime, watch the mountains of oranges slop down to a putrefying ooze; and in the eyes of the people there is the failure; and in the eyes of the hungry there is a growing wrath. In the souls of the people the grapes of wrath are filling and growing heavy, growing heavy for the vintage."

-Page 477 in my 1972 Viking Compass paperback

Raymond Carver... kind of.

Let's face it. Our suggested reading list from yesterday came a little too late to do you any good this weekend. More likely than not it was cinema that provided a timely escape from the in-laws and family squabbles that are inevitable once the tryptophan coma wears off. So, let's talk movies.

I recently rented Everything Must Go with Will Ferrell (by which I mean he starred in the film- the two of us didn't actually rent it together- though that would make for an infinitely cooler blog post.)

I'm not ashamed to admit I like Mr. Ferrell's work. This wasn't exactly a comedy, but he's shown decent "dramedy" chops in Stranger Than Fiction and I thought it would be worth a try. But I really picked this one off the shelf for one simple reason: The cover told me the film was based off a Raymond Carver short story, "Why Don't You Dance?"

I'd never read that story, but I love Carver and thought it would be interesting to make a comparison after the fact. So, we watched it, and even enjoyed it. That is, until I went and read the story.

Once I read Carver's original, I had no choice but to throw Everything Must Go into the same film adaptation category as The Polar Express. In other words, one or two details were preserved, and the rest of the movie was made from whole cloth (for those interested, the two details were a protagonist who drank a lot, and the arrangement of a bunch of his belongings on his front lawn.)

It also got me thinking about how often I've been disappointed by Hollywood's take on my favorite books. Unfortunately, literary fiction doesn't generally translate very well on the big screen. Either the vision of the original work just isn't there, or the budget is woefully inadequate. Here are some stinkers I've sat through, or in some cases, started and given up on:

• The Great Gatsby (1974), Robert Redford & Mia Farrow. Decent sets and... that's about it. They made it about as boring as possible. That, and you'll constantly hear the Law & Order "clang-clang" sound in your head, since Nick Carraway is played by a young Sam Waterston.
• Slaughterhouse-Five (1972), Michael Sacks. Cheap, cheap, cheap. Outside of the Godfather and a handful of other films, why didn't the film industry just fold up their tents and wait out the seventies?
• The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), George Sanders. I loved this book, and couldn't make it through 10 minutes of the movie. I have not seen the 2005 remake.
• The Fountainhead (1949), Gary Cooper & Patricia Neal. My favorite of Rand's books, hands down. The movie was... not good.
• Basically anything of Hemingway's has sucked, with the one exception below, including Spencer Tracy's Old Man and The Sea, and Gary Cooper's For Whom the Bell Tolls.

There are, as I mentioned, a few exceptions. I'll list some here:

• A Farewell To Arms (1957), Rock Hudson & Jennifer Jones. Jones wasn't exactly what I was expecting, but Hudson was a great cast. The producers gave the film the sweeping war-time imagery it deserved, and did the quiet moments justice, as well.
• Of Mice and Men (1992), John Malkovich & Gary Sinise. Gorgeous picture, as heart-rending as Steinbeck's original.
• Pride and Prejudice (1995), Colin Firth & Jennifer Ehle. The ultimate chick-flick, and I mean a "turn in your man card if you didn't get the entire Bourne Trilogy in return" kind of a chick-flick. But I'm secretly a huge fan of this miniseries. They nailed it every step of the way. Of course, they did have five hours to work with...

Always a glutton for punishment, I'm waiting with bated breath for Leonardo DiCaprio to step into the roll of Jay Gatsby next year (not even kidding) and if I'm bored enough in the coming months, I may even check out Part I of the shoestring budget Atlas Shrugged that hit a few theaters earlier this year. In the meantime, I'd love to hear what movies based on literary fiction have lived up to your expectations? Fire at will.