La route au tabac

I saw John Ford and I thought wow undiscovered gold. I was wrong. I was hoping for a Steinbeck masterpiece like The Grapes of Wrath. Boy did I get a surprise. This is a cartoon. A child's movie. A dung heap of a movie. Do yourself a solid, do not waste your time.

John Ford's film adaptation of a hit stage play is an uneasy blend of humour and melancholy in which shiftless hillbilly patriarch Jeeter Lester (Charley Grapewin) tries to find the $100 he needs to prevent his disintegrating family from being evicted from their ramshackle homestead. The melancholic undertone eventually cuts through the relentless shouting but the broad characterisations fatally weaken its message.

A very rare instance when I couldn't get through a movie. After about 40 minutes I couldn't take any more of the hymn singing and the screaming of these stupid, stupid, unsympathetic characters. I'm not familiar with the play the movie's based on, but Ford's version elicits only disdain for these characters, rather than empathy. And Ford's lapdog, Ward Bond, always creeps me out. After reading his bio, it turns out he was exactly the kind of idiot I expected him to be.

So much of this 1941 film reminds me of The Beverly Hillbillies and other movies dealing with rural impoverished America. Most of the film is absolutely inane with Jeeter Lester (Charley Grapewin in a good performance) running around trying to sell wood, so as to make the payment for his place. "Tobacco Road" depicts rural America at its most impoverished level, and therefore the film should have been much more serious in tone. Nevertheless, the last 10 minutes or so becomes poignant when it appears that Jeeter and wife Elizabeth Patterson will land up in the poor house. Due to the kindness of friend Dana Andrews, they get a six month stay to come up with a bumper crop. After all is said and done, Jeeter resorts to laziness and you come away with the impression that nothing positive shall get done. Is this really Americana? Gene Tierney is in the movie as daughter Ellie Mae. Ellie Mae! Wasn't that the daughter's name in Beverly Hillbillies?

After a bank purchases the land, a family of hillbillies faces eviction if it can't come up with the rent. Based on a Caldwell novel that in turn became a stage play, this is very broad comedy that rarely rises above the level of The Three Stooges. Grapewin plays a lazy farmer who has so many children that he and his wife can't keep track of them. Tracy is horribly over-the-top as one of the grown children living at home. Tierney is third billed as Tracy's useless sister but barely has a line of dialog. Rambeau does OK as a neighbor. Andrews plays the only character who has some dignity. Every once in a while Ford came up with a real clunker, and this is one of them.

Director John Ford was certainly an odd duck; the stories he was attracted to ran the gamut from "The Searchers" to "The Quiet Man" to this one, a head-scratcher of a tragicomedy based on Erskine Caldwell's book and Jack Kirkland's popular stage-adaptation. Eccentric Georgia farm family is threatened with poverty when the bank forecloses on their land, leading patriarch Jeeter to use his wiles in hopes of raising $100 for a year's worth of rent. Movie swings wildly from hick-slapstick to poignant drama; however, once you've had a chance to get attuned to Ford's rhythm, it's a pretty terrific ride. Charley Grapewin gives an Oscar-caliber performance (he wasn't even nominated!), and it's fun to see Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews looking very youthful three years before "Laura". Good show! *** from ****