In the film, Tom Joad approaches from the sunbaked vortex of a highway crossroads—a narrow body off center in a proscenium of telephone poles, wearing an ill-fitting suit and walking sideways. He hitches a ride with a gabby trucker; warding off the man’s idle curiosities, Tom shows no need to be liked. But then, alighting from the cab, Fonda grins at the trucker, taunting him with a conciliation that is actually a threat—and the smile radiates charisma, charm, sexiness. This man could be in movies. This man could strike you dead.
From the start, Fonda’s body stance is nervous but composed, tense and ready. Skinny body in its black suit with high-water cuffs, arms angled outward to stick hands in pockets, pelvis jutting slightly; lots of sunlight between the bony elbows and narrow hips. Watchful eyes in a rectangular head, topped by a huge cloth cap shadowing the eyes throughout the story.
Fonda’s acting is close to the bone, and John Ford is in complete command of the early scenes. Tom leaves the highway for the overland trail and—walking uphill and away, like Lincoln—heads for the Joad place, along the way meeting Casy (John Carradine). Ford catches the novel’s drawing of dust-bowl country as a spirit-ridden flatland, its dust thick with the matter of vanished things and people. He shoots in high-contrast light and rough-hewn settings, pruning Steinbeck’s flowers of prose to leave only stalk and stem. Fonda and Carradine walk a darkening road; their voices echo against the landscape. The echo is an effect of the soundstage upon which the scene plays, but under the darkness and the wind, it sounds more like a reverberation in a corridor of time.
The image is active, the performing excitingly terse, director and star in tight sync. We feel we’re watching a great movie. The confrontation with Muley may be its best passage—it is certainly its high point of horror, just from John Qualen’s bug-eyed ferocity, and Fonda’s and Carradine’s awed regard of it. Muley materializes from shadows, and cinematographer Gregg Toland gives the illusion of lighting the pitch-dark cabin with a single blazing candle, floating Muley’s ghost face in a flat black depth.
These are brilliant scenes, brilliant in the framing, lighting, and acting, with raw emotion enflaming pious dialogue. Their intensity has to do with movement, less of the camera than of the image itself—the willow branches that undulate as Tom and Casy talk in the foreground, the clothes waving on a line as the Graves family is evicted. The frame is vibrant with shifting darkness, scuttling bodies, sinister weather. In the committed deliveries of Fonda, Carradine, and Qualen, the talk sounds timeless, and the interactions have the gravity of encounters in ancient plays.
When Ford pulls out of Muley’s first flashback, the camera is on Tom’s watching, listening face; as significant as Muley’s defeat is Joad’s role as witness to it. Something like the enormity of what has been happening during his imprisonment begins to dawn on our hero. Muley asks Tom where his people are. “They’re all gone ’r dead,” Tom says, as if it were not a guess, but a decision.
But Ford shoots Fonda’s back, not his face, as he says the line. Joad will witness others’ devastations, but his own will stay hidden.
* * *
The picture’s first movement ends with Tom spitting into the weeds as government agents search the Joad place. The next begins when we jump from Tom to his family, as it prepares to leave for California. And here, the film slackens—becomes too much a conventional John Ford celebration of the clan. The old men are too cantankerous, the postadolescents too pretty, the children too manic. Jane Darwell hauls into view as Ma Joad, mother of mothers, ladling the thin soup of homily, and we feel the sag into compromise.
The movie has peaked too soon. John Ford will need Fonda, as he needed him in Young Mr. Lincoln, to hold things together—to put flesh on metaphors, to give scale to the overacting of other performers. It is a huge act of Fonda’s will to be this encompassing presence, because The Grapes of Wrath doesn’t always seem to have been shot with the same eyes, or felt with the same nervous system. It goes from nighttime Gothic to daylight realism, easing into studio-bound New Deal idyll before compelling itself toward an optimistic ending that imparts the illusion of unity to what has actually been a very mixed bag.
Yet the movie pulls through. Like the Joad jalopy, it threatens to break down when overheated by bad acting or false framing. Then it will be steadied by a scene of direct and heartrending sentiment, an image of perfect composition and absolute subtlety: Ma burning her mementos, holding earrings to her reflection in a smoky mirror; gusts of wind sweeping Uncle John’s shack after the Joads drive away.
If The Grapes of Wrath is the story of one family’s struggle and survival, it is equally the story of Henry Fonda’s face and the changes it goes through. His look goes from hostility as he hitches with the trucker to shock and mystification at hearing Muley’s tale. Riding west, the face is baked by sun, labor, and relentlessness into an attitude of hunger—dry eyes squinting, chapped face craning forward on skinny neck. In the dark scenes, the face is repeatedly caught in lamplight, flashlight, moonlight, Ford fascinated by the emotional secrets exposed by illumination and shadow.
The family takes refuge in a government encampment over the California border. In Ford’s New Deal view, the place is a utopia, with clean cabins and sanitary toilets; you can smell the fresh lumber. It is an outpost of hope, and Fonda’s face honors hope as it honors Joad’s other grudging shows of warm feeling. Passing a communal well, Fonda lets water course through his fingers and, per the posted sign, turns off the tap. Then he smiles, his face slightly away from the camera. It is Tom’s first smile in ages, and so small that we wonder whether it registers hope of an equitable social system, or only shows us a man sharing a joke with himself—smiling to think that a stream of water could represent anything so large and impossible as life.
The government camp sponsors a community dance. The dance is Ford’s delight, his happy obverse to the war scene or gunfight, an expression of cooperation; it’s also a place for tensions to be expressed, or dispersed in the air. In this dance sequence, we see not only the migrants stifling an attempt by fruit-company thugs to incite a riot and bring martial law down on the camp but also Tom’s sole moment of lightheartedness—waltzing with Ma while singing “Red River Valley.” It is nothing much: a boxy, vertical back-and-forth movement, a rasping, tuneless voice. Yet there is beauty in the rasp, grace in these awkward bodies. Ma looks up with speechless joy; Tom beams down. His look is suddenly clear and content, and we realize that this is a man in whom love exists. The movie has realized a moment of perfect escape, a moment to defer farewells, a moment to stop time.
* * *
In fact, two strands of time, of progress, have been brought together. As the story has progressed from dust bowl to peach valley, devastation to exile, it has taken Tom Joad back—back to what he was before prison, or perhaps never was at all: an innocent man.
Tom’s final scene with Ma is prefaced with a lovely shot of Fonda rising in silhouette before the low-lit canvas of the tent flap and looking down at Ma with a cigarette in his mouth. Tom whispers to go outside. He leans to kiss sleeping Pa on the forehead. Then follows Tom’s farewell, a speech that not so many years ago was shared culture and common language. The speech exists in Steinbeck’s novel, but not as summation or climax, only as one significant leave-taking among many. Here, it is the capstone of the story: Tom Joad’s acceptance of a destiny.
Watch, and realize that Ford does little to prime the speech—does not wreathe the actors in filtered light, or cue violins from behind. Even less does Fonda act out an actor’s big moment. He edges up to the words, feels forward into the frame of mind that produces them. He delivers not a speech, but a string of thoughts and impressions leading to a natural climax.
He’s been thinking about Casy, Tom says, “about what he said, what he done, about how he died … I remember all of it.” Fonda’s poise, sitting at the edge of the dance floor with Ma, is to hold in his elbows and knees like a small boy, cold and nervous, cradling his tramp bag. Tom tell
s Ma he must leave so he can “find out somethin’ … scrounge around.” He can’t say what it might be, but he has a feeling Casy was right: “A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul. The one big soul that belongs to everybody.”
“What’ll happen to you then?” Ma asks, and Tom replies:
I’ll be all around in the dark. I’ll be everywhere … Wherever there’s a fight so hungry people can eat, I’ll be there. Wherever there’s a cop beatin’ up a guy, I’ll be there. I’ll be in the way guys yell when they’re mad. I’ll be in the way kids laugh when they’re hungry and they know supper’s ready. And when people are eatin’ the stuff they raise and livin’ in the houses they build, I’ll be there, too.
Fonda creates the suggestion of stress around the eyes, as of tears that won’t surface. He conjures the openness of a face that despite its scar and stubble, its years of hurt and humiliation, suddenly looks youthful. We remember the hard, hooded face we first saw, and realize that, by stages, the face has spread open before us and grown younger, been reborn into something like innocence, something like terror.
Tom’s farewell affects us because Fonda neither accedes to heroism nor resists it. He merely gives the words their less obvious meaning—that accepting one’s complicity in the fate of the whole race might be far more terrifying than exhilarating. We must, if we are to feel anything, feel the curse that has fallen on Tom, the burden he has decided to accept. So Fonda won’t smile serenely as he says “I’ll be there.” His eyes won’t mist over, nor his chest expand and sinews stretch as they reach for their moral purpose. Instead, he will suggest fear with the slope of his eyebrows, the downward curve of his mouth—as if the man inside were melting with dread at the choice he faces.
It’s easy to feel distance from the words Tom speaks because they sound so damnably literary. They are an idea, and people tend not to express themselves in terms of ideas. But this film is a product of a time when Americans were forced by calamity and hunger to reconfigure their lives and their ethics. One had either to commit to something new, reinvest thin hope in failed systems, or renounce the idea of community and drop out. One’s life had to become the expression of that choice, and therefore of an idea. Tom Joad’s last words are literary, but they are fair. They are even accurate. But they could so easily have been botched by a bad intonation, a moment’s puffery or tainting streak of ego. Fonda walks the line. He reads past the social moment that produces the words, to express the burden of a man trapped and transformed by American history.
Our last view of Tom is of a tiny figure walking away over a far hill in early morning, with “Red River Valley” sounding on a sad accordion. The figure could be anyone—Tom Joad, or another anonymous soul on the open road. To become someone, he has chosen to be no one. To enter America, he has chosen to disappear into it.
* * *
Is Tom Joad striding on ahead, leading us to glory, or is he only walking away, showing us his ass? Well—say he is doing both. Say both are part of a flow, a oneness. In doing both—refusing and committing, striding on and walking away—Tom has already become what Casy imagined. So has Fonda.
“The one big soul that belongs to everybody”: Much is contained in that line. “The big soul” means that community exists, that there is a group identity greater than the many single identities within it. But for anyone with Fonda’s suspicions of the crowd, it also means taking into account how easily, when people join in a mass, health turns into sickness, moral people into mere fingers of the lynch mob or fascist army.
“The big soul” means, too, that one person can leave a Henry Fonda film feeling affirmed in the rightness of things as they appear, while another leaves the same film convinced that Fonda has colored blood—that hidden relationships and murky continuities function in him. It means that those truths are fused in a body and a face, a pair of eyes, a mind and a memory; and that the contradictions of community and country flow, for one revelatory stretch of film, through one man.
Whether or not we believe in “the big soul,” Fonda shows that he believes in it. And we feel that his belief comes through layers of experience, empathy, and uncertainty that his own soul can ever begin to relinquish the cold strength of solitude. Somehow we know that Fonda has always believed in the big soul, and wondered of its claim on him long before Tom Joad appeared to give him the words he would have chosen for himself, were words and not action his manner of expressing his sorrow to the world:
“I remember all of it.”
5
Ways of Escape
The Lady Eve
“Death in the guise of the new life in California is not going to prevail over me,” says the main character in Walker Percy’s novel The Second Coming. “Death in the guise of marriage and family and children is not going to prevail over me.”
Family and domesticity are, for many, an irresistible lure, and a hook in the mouth. The lures are warmth, security, familiarity, legacy. The hook is a feeling of entrapment, that one’s own needs and desires are forever subordinate to those of others. As that hook pierces and digs deeper with every year, resentment grows. Who are these people? Why do they believe they have the right to all that I am? Can’t they leave me alone?
Fear that in the bosom of the family hides the death of the individual may be irrational. It may be a sane person’s best defense against the crushing effects of mismatched parents and incomprehensible children. Or it may be a certain kind of person’s natural recoil from closeness and community.
Some who feel the resentment express it, while others hold it inside. They play at being spouse and parent, meeting what they feel are the reasonable requirements of an unwritten contract. Bad feelings collect near the surface of life, and fester there. Quiet and stoicism become an especially unpleasant form of aggression as the violent act is replaced by the roaring silence. The hook digs deeper, but the blood stays on the inside, flowing backward, down the throat.
* * *
Henry and Frances now have two children: Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda, born December 21, 1937, and Peter Henry Fonda, born February 23, 1940. Both are delivered in New York City by cesarean section.
Frances learns of her and Henry’s first conception not long after Ross Alexander’s suicide, and just as You Only Live Once is reaching theaters. The news makes her happy—she especially wants a boy—and Henry claims to be leaping with excitement. Then one day, like all fathers-to-be, he wakes up, blinks his eyes, and realizes the limits that are about to constrict him. At which point, like many fathers-to-be, he begins to spend as much time out of the house as he can manage.
Always a workhorse, he increases his pace, filming That Certain Woman with Bette Davis as Frances readies the nest. Henry then fancies a return to the stage—first at the Westchester Playhouse for a summer-stock rendition of The Virginian, then at the 46th Street Theatre, site of his Dan Harrow triumph, for Valentine Davies’s Blow Ye Winds, a romantic comedy with a seaside setting and, as critics see it, insufficient salt in the talk.* Why would Fonda choose this summer to return east—for the privilege of acting in two mediocre plays, or to evade the gathering realities of fatherhood?
Blow Ye Winds wheezes to a close after only thirty-six performances. By this point, Frances has come to New York, first to oversee the auctioning of George Brokaw’s furniture, and, second, to have the baby delivered by her personal obstetrician at the exclusive Doctors Hospital on the Upper East Side. Completing the missed connections of people who seem to be avoiding each other, Frances settles into her maternity bed just as Henry flies back to Hollywood to begin shooting Jezebel, the final film on his three-picture contract with Warner Bros.
But Henry is a decent man as well as a selfish one: He has had a provision written into his Jezebel contract that requires director William Wyler to release him from the production when the baby’s birth becomes imminent. When Jane arrives, Henry is at Frances’s bedside. After a brief visit, he returns to Hollywood; it is another two weeks befor
e Frances follows him, Jane in her arms.
Henry goes almost directly from the set of Jezebel to the set of his next movie, Blockade, while Frances arranges the family’s move to a new house on Monaco Drive in the Pacific Palisades area of Los Angeles. (Margaret Sullavan and Leland Hayward—Henry’s ex-wife and his agent, now married and starting their own family—move in a few doors away.) There’s much crisscrossing activity in these weeks; the couple continue to be conspicuously separated.
“Dad was so emotionally distant,” Jane says, “with a coldness Mother was not equipped to breach.” Contrasted to that are what she calls his “Protestant rages.” Henry is absent much of the time, work being his chief concern: He has the male intentness on production and utility, and family exhausts his patience for nonsense. If the silence is a passive withdrawal from the burden of others’ emotional needs, the rage runs deeper—too deep to be considered anything but a basic component of Henry’s character. “We were all afraid of Jane’s father in those days,” says a friend. “We always felt he was a time bomb ready to explode.”
Frances has her own preoccupations, which Joshua Logan identifies as “children, operations, jewelry, [and] the stock market.” She is a hypochondriac, and visitors note that she seems excessively fearful that germs will get at the baby. Henry will later complain that he is not allowed to be as affectionate with his daughter as he wishes—that baby Jane is effectively “quarantined,” and that Frances makes him wear a mask when nuzzling her.
Frances lavishes her attentions on Peter, who will grow into a sickly, neurotic child, a melancholy charge of private schools and relatives, with a destructive streak and penchant for violent games. There is also a half sibling in the house—Pan, Frances’s daughter by Brokaw, six years older than Jane. There is gender ambiguity: Jane plays the tomboy to ape the masculinity of her adored father, and to be the son her mother wanted; while sensitive Peter is a constant source of perplexity to manly Dad.
The Man Who Saw a Ghost: The Life and Work of Henry Fonda Page 10