During the Battle of Minneapolis in January 2026, Bruce Springsteen accompanied by Tom Morello played a concert at First Avenue on the stage made famous by Prince. The concert was in support of the armies of protestors who openly opposed and, in some instances, impeded ICE personnel brutalizing people on the streets of Minneapolis. The concert's motto was "ICE out!", a phrase chanted by the people in the room and balcony overlooking the stage. Springsteen played his protest song written for the occasion, an anthem called "The Streets of Minneapolis" in which the singer calls out the authoritarian violence occurring on Nicollet Avenue and declares resistance to the goons who killed the American citizens Rebecca Good and Alex Pretti. Springsteen also sang "The Ghost of Tom Joad", another anthem about poverty in the United States and the progressive forces arrayed against that poverty. In this song, the symbol for resistance to the corrupt "New World Order" is the protagonist of John Steinbeck's 1939 novel, The Grapes of Wrath, Tom Joad. The song cites some of Joad's famous promise to his mother that he will be present in spirit any time the forces of injustice oppress the poor and, also, anytime the poor rise to express their joyous resistance.. Morello unleashes a savage guitar attack on the evils identified in the song -- he uses every possible virtuosic technique to dramatize the ingenuity, rage, and hurricane-level force with which people will oppose tyrants: at one point in the concert, he plays his guitar with his teeth (after the manner of Jimi Hendrix) turning the instrument over to reveal a placard that reads "Arrest the President!"; the front side of his guitar is emblazoned "ARM THE HOMELESS!" The idea seems to be that the storm is coming, wrath is at hand, and the righteous will trample out the "vintage of the grapes of wrath" in an irrepressible uprising, a sonic storm of steel.
Inspired by this concert (you can see it on You-Tube), I decided to take another look at John Ford's 1940 Grapes of Wrath. The movie is made with fierce urgency and feels like a documentary. (It's somewhat like Guzman's The Battle of Chile or Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers.) In a hundred years, people will understand the Great Depression through Ford's film -- it's imagery, I expect, will replace actual footage from the Depression in the imaginations of Americans; I think this is a phenomenon similar to what will occur with Spielberg's Schindler's List -- the Hollywood movie that will likely come to stand in for the horrors that it presents. (Something similar has a;ready happened with regard to Eisenstein's films -- footage from Eisenstein's pictures about the Russian Revolution have actually come to signify the Revolution to the extent that the tentative and very uncommunicative real pictures and film are mostly banished to the outer darkness.
Ford's documentary effects are achieved by a variety of means. First, there is the bleak but spectacular photography by Gregg Toland -- images that have an iconic force; lone figures striding through desolate landscapes, night shots full of shadow and light that look like George la Tour (for instance, Henry Fonda as Tom Joad delivers his famous speech by the light of a cigarette -- his sharp features are sculpted in an acid-bath of shadow; the crowd scenes in shanty towns or near fence-lines mobbed by striking workers have a singular power and immediacy without surrendering the authority of single faces and contorted bodies to choreographed group motion: German expressionism and the Russians reduce crowds to abstract vectors, diagrams of force. Ford's crowds, whether brawling or dancing, display a unity of motion highlighting, however, individuals within the group. The protagonist, Tom Joad, is no saint -- he's a walking hair trigger of anger and bitterness. When his mother says that she prayed that prison would not make her son "mean", you can see that it has been "touch and go" with Tom -- his rage is explosive and when he strikes, he kills. Tom constantly makes cynical and bitter comments even to those helping him (he taunts a truckdriver who gives him a ride) -- he's a highly flawed and, even, frightening protagonist. Midway through the movie, my wife said that the people "all looked so weird" and asked why the extras and, even, some of the main figures in the movie were so eccentric in appearance -- in fact, downright ugly. Clearly Ford is simulating the austere and stark portraits of victims of Depression as portrayed by Dorothea Lange and Walker Evans -- the people in the film, look gaunt, haggard, they have bulging eyes and, often, move in a shaky way; clearly these are people who have been starved. The young girls are bony and there are big-eyed skeletal children and wretched old ladies trying to uphold their dignity in frayed sun-bonnets and threadbare dresses. Everything is vividly imagined and clearly shown - the farm trucks weighted down with immigrants seem impossibly frail and overloaded; the small impoverished towns look suitably unwelcoming, the ruined farms squashed by caterpillars, the pointless gestures of defiance: men brandishing guns that they are too beaten and crestfallen to fire, meaningless brawls, a preacher defiantly holding out his arms to be cuffed at the wrist. There's four-fifths of a work of genius on screen. The last ten minutes declines a little into sermonizing and the sermons are delivered in bad faith -- obviously, the only answer to the misery that we see is some form of Communist Revolution, but John Ford (and screenwriter Nunnally Johnson) aren't willing to endorse the logic of that solution and, so, the movie glides into a kind of mysticism about the omnipresence of Tom Joad and the resilience of the People. (with a Sandbergian capitol "P"). In the film's last shots, we see Tom Joad striding alone against a barren horizon. Then, Ford shows us a great procession of rattle-trap trucks, crowded as floats in a May Day parade, crossing the desolate land -- it's supposed to be a sign of the ever-enduring power of the people. But, ghosts don't lead flesh-and-blood revolutions and Bruce Springsteen's song is about "the ghost of Tom Joad." But the picture's delirious, half-baked ending is also filmmaking of a high order just not as powerful as the genius stuff of the first 4/5ths of the picture.
The excellence of the movie lies in its innumerable, powerful details. When a gun is discharged in a Hooverville, an old lady is hit by the bullet and lies dying in the dirt street. Two other old ladies cradle her body in their arms and cry out: "She's bleeding to death." A sheriff's officer shrugs and says "those 45's do sure make a mess." The matriarch of the Joad clan tries to feed a crowd of starving childrn. One of the kids sniffs that he's had a chicken recently and doesn't want hand-outs -- another little kid says the boy and his dad are lying and that they are just as hungry as rest of them. Ma sends the mob of urchins to "get flat sticks" so they can scrape out the bottom of her stew pot. But the kids run to a mountain of empty cans and pick them up so they will have something to put their booty in. The cop in a small California town says that he came from Oklahoma only two years earlier and, then, warmly greets the Joad family -- a breath later, he tells them to get out of town before sundown. In a work-camp built like a KZ Lager, management systematically cheats the workers, unilaterally reducing their wages to less than starvation pay. People protesting this injustice get beaten with ax-handles. The half-crazed former preacher, played with wild-eyed enthusiasm by John Cassavetes is killed for advocating "mutual assistance" and collective action. In the final scene, the migrant workers have left a WPA camp where they are treated kindly, provided medical care, and protected by the Federal Government. What has enticed them to leave this safe harbor? I guess it's Ford's desire to end with a spectacular image, that is, to show us a panorama of old and battered trucks stretching to the horizon and rolling down the highway into the sunset.
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