The Adventures of Mark Twain - 1944

The Adventures of Mark Twain (1944) features a central figure so familiar as to be legendary, and the film leans heavy on legend.  We mark tomorrow’s anniversary of Mark Twain’s birth.

What we discover about Mark Twain through this movie is not so much facts about his life (particularly when the facts are toyed with and not in the order of their appearance), but rather how he fits into, and even represents, the grand mosaic of 19^th century American culture.  This is a rich story of a vibrant era. 

We are also treated to the rarely-presented world of history through literature. 

Bret Harte, William Dean Howells, Longfellow, Whittier, Emerson, Rudyard Kipling all parade before us.  They are cameos, but they are presented as giants.  I particularly like that the film expects us to know who they are. 

A modern film might throw the answers to an ignorant audience the way a fellow student slips test answers to a pal beside him, which is ignominious, and unflattering both to ourselves and the great writers.

Mark Twain’s greatest struggle, apart from money worries, is to measure up to these literary lions.  That he finds his own place in popular literature and that the 20^th century lauds him with movies and stage plays and television programs, and does not do so for the aforementioned first-string players — this would astonish Twain more than anyone.

This is a film more of style than of substance, and for those dismissive of it I would suggest they consider that in classic film, a biopic is less like a Ken Burns documentary and more like an interpretive dance.

Yes, I am being facetious.

The movie is a series of events like tall tales, and even the introduction to the film cheekily warns us not to be too judgmental.  First we are on a hill watching Halley’sComet awe and terrify the townspeople as Samuel Langhorne Clemens is born into this world.  He will joke repeatedly throughout his life that he came in with the comet and will surely leave the earth when the comet is due to return in the next century.  In a life of quips and witticisms, and wry observations, that he actually did die on the occasion when Halley’s returned in 1910 is probably the biggest joke of all.

But a lot happened in the meantime, and the movie is stuffed with scenes that roll out a long carpet of experiences and adventures.  The director plunks us down in the 19^th century with beautifully staged settings, many of them artful miniatures, of the majestic Mississippi, its riverbanks bathed in moonlight.  We see the long gambling salon on the riverboat (too long to be realistic, but this isn’t a documentary, it’s a pop-up book), and the lordly riverboats that young Sam so admires.

We know he took his eventual pen name, “Mark Twain” from the call of the riverboat men who are testing the depths of the water for channels deep enough for the riverboats to pass safely.  Two fathoms is a safe depth, so when they mark “twain” on the measure, it is two fathoms.  The sing-song call, “MARR-R-K…T-W-A-A-A-I-I-N-N!” is used stirringly at dramatic moments, and is replicated in notes on the musical score of the film, a clever reprise.

Unlike most movies about great men, Mark Twain is not shown as a man born to greatness.  On the contrary, he’s a stumblebum who runs off to join a riverboat crew because he can’t stand working in his brother’s print shop setting type by hand.  (His aversion will later move him to invest, disastrously, in an early mechanical typesetter.)  He runs off to the western mining camps to get rich, and doesn’t.  He delivers a stand-up routine at a dinner for the aforementioned literary giants, and, trying too hard to be funny, insults them in a kind of Friar’s roast.  His act tanks and we see his panic as he makes a fool of himself.  We begin to wonder if this guy will ever do anything right.

His one stroke of luck seems to be catching a glimpse of a fellow traveler’s photo of a beloved sister.  Twain falls in the love with the picture, and eventually the woman, who as his wife will help him achieve lasting success as a writer.

Twain has a lower estimation of his talents, and wants to write something great and important, but the audience sees, even if Twain does not, that the body of his work adds up to a chronicling of America in its most expansive, confident, chest-thumping and stumblebum charm.

Fredric March, who we last saw here in I Married a Witch (1942), is the adult Mark Twain, in a spot-on performance.  It can’t be easy creating a character so well known, and relying in good part on mimicry and imitation.  It’s a tightrope to walk.  With the help of makeup man Perc Westmore, Mr. March is the very image of Mark Twain.  One of the fine achievements of this movie is the way the characters, Twain in particular, age so gradually and so realistically we may feel amazed by the end of the film that so much time has passed.  The aging of characters in other films of this era is usually something of a jolt, and artificial-looking. 

Alexis Smith plays his wife, and though we may note it’s another woman-behind-the-great-man role where she has little challenge, it’s still a nice piece for her.  This is a much softer role in contrast to the sophisticates she often played, and with little makeup in the early scenes, her natural beauty is quite lovely, more stunning than her glamour roles.

Miss Smith is a one-woman cheerleading squad for Mark Twain, but in real life Mrs. Clemens did more than just encourage him.  She actually edited most of his work and he came to rely on her judgment.

Alan Hale is along for the ride as Twain’s prospector pal in his patented jovial scamp gig.  John Carradine gets a marvelous brief scene as the writer Bret Harte who, in the famed contest between the jumping frogs, exhorts his frog, “Daniel Webster” with the plea, “If you love me…”  And repeated calls, “Flies!  Flies!” to encourage the magnificent amphibian to hop.  I don’t know if Mr. Carradine ever played a scene so intense with a human.

Donald Crisp is at Twain’s elbow as his manager, who also gets the impressive aging treatment.  Walter Hampden is great as Alexis Smith’s disapproving father in a scene where he tries to remove Twain from his home.

C. Aubrey Smith delivers a magnificent address at the end of the film when Mark Twain is honored at Oxford.  His scene is a standout.  That beautifully craggy face and his meticulous speech.

Joyce Reynolds, who we last saw here in The Constant Nymph (1943), plays Twain’s daughter, Clara, horrified at spotting the return of Halley’s Comet.

A few scenes of note:  I love when the teenaged Samuel Clemens is getting his first lesson in piloting a riverboat by grumpy Robert Barrat.  Dickie Jones is the youth, who has very few lines, but the scene is marvelous.  It runs quite a long time, with close-ups on the boy’s face as he nervously reacts to the dangers of the river and Mr. Barrat’s constant barking at him. 

He’s shaking in his shoes, and when at last he manages to pull into a safe channel and the crewman sings, “M-A-A-R-R-RK…T-W-A-A-I-I-N-N-N!” we see the tears glisten in his dark velvet eyes with wonder and gratitude, and love of this river.  I don’t suppose it’s necessary to the story as a whole, but I imagine director Irving Rapper kept the attention focused on Dickie Jones for so long because he fell in love with the boy like I did.  I think it’s one of the most powerful close-ups I’ve ever seen.

The anxious expression in his soft boy’s face, on the verge of manhood.  We last saw Dickie as a much younger child here in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939) where he played the congressional page.

The scene where Mark Twain does one of his very first public speaking jobs.  Look at the hall filled with extras, and look at their costumes.  Such attention to the style and setting of an era is wonderful.  There don’t seem to be many shortcuts taken, as we sometimes see in other films where the sets or costumes, or hair is judged by the studio evidently as being “close enough.”

We may gag at Twain’s grotesque, “well done, good and faithful servant” joke, and note how African Americans, particularly the unfortunate Willie Best as a butler, get the stereotypical treatment in this film.  However, there is an aspect to their presence in this movie that I admire, and that is that they are indeed present.  We see them on hill watching Halley’s Comet, and as passengers on the riverboat.  They work on the river, and live on the river, and they are the boys on the raft.  If their story is not told yet, at least we see they are not invisible.  We see they are part of the mosaic that makes up America.  For Hollywood at this time, this is something.

We get a glimpse of Mark Twain’s house in Hartford.  See my post on my New England Travels blog for more on his home, which still stands a museum today.  This weekend, another actor famed for portraying Mark Twain, Hal Holbrook, will be honored at the Mark Twain House when a hall is dedicated in his name. 

As Mark Twain’s life unfolds it gets busier.  He and his wife lose a baby son.  They have three daughters.  He travels the world to earn money to pay back debts.  He saves the fortunes of Ulysses S. Grant when the former Union general and President is dying of cancer, and struggles to write his memoirs to provide for his family.  Twain, in his own fledgling company, publishes them.

March has a moving scene when he sings “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” at the piano as his wife lay dying.  Decades later in an interview Alexis Smith noted that Fredric March’s work in this movie was underrated.  In an article at the time of filming, she commented that she had a hard time, even though she was supposed to be dead, to keep from peeking at March to watch him in his scene.

Back to the pop-up book nature of the movie — the scenes where tiny figures of Huck Finn, Tom Sawyer, and Jim superimposed on the written page, or revisit Twain at the moment of his death and take him by the hand to a distant sunset are imagery we would not see in a biopic today. 

But this is a tale, not a documentary.  It captures the mood and the tragedy, and optimism of this man’s era.  We may be witnessing more Currier and Ives than Vital Records, but that is the nature of interpretive dance.

Remember also that during World War II the movies were reaching back to a comfortable American image to appeal to a frightened audience.  Twain’s speech, “our tolerance will never become indifference, and our freedom never come license.  Let’s respect each other’s rights…” reflects not only his progressive views, as cantankerously as he sometimes phrased them, but also speaks to a nervous America on the precipice of doom.

For more on The Adventures of Mark Twain have a look at Cliff Aliperti’s two posts on his terrific Immortal Ephemera blog here and here.  The movie was filmed in 1942, but not released until 1944.  For a more detailed explanation why, have a look at Harold Sherman’s “Behind theScreenplay” here.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century.

Swamp Water - 1941

“Swamp Water” (1941) was what did it for Dana Andrews. After a few years in Hollywood bouncing between bit parts, an apprenticeship at the Pasadena Playhouse, and working as a gas station attendant, it took a trip to the Okefenokee to really launch his film career as a leading man.

This is part of the Dana Andrews Blogathon over at Classic Move Man, with links to other blogs posted this Saturday, July 28th.

Dana Andrews knew himself that ''Swamp Water" would be important to his career. In June 1941 he took “a fast cross country airliner,” to Waycross, Georgia to film on location according to the Waycross Journal-Herald of June 25, 1941. “‘It’s my big chance,’ laughed young Andrews a bit groggy after his first plane trip but fascinated by it all to such a degree he hadn’t been able to sleep.”

Thirty-three years later, in his mid-60s, in another phase of his career when performing dinner theatre in “Best of Friends” at the Alhambra Theatre, Jacksonville, Florida, Andrews took his wife on a side trip to the Okefenokee. He wanted to show her where he had filmed some scenes for “Swamp Water”. He was recognized in a Waycross diner. (Waycross Journal-Herald, February 13, 1974).

Dana Andrews had been the only principal actor to film in the Okefenokee, not counting his hound dog in the film, “Trouble.” According the Journal-Herald, Trouble also arrived on the same plane with Mr. Andrews, “‘sick as a dog’ from flying so high” in these days before jet planes with pressurized cabins.

Director Jean Renoir, in his first American film, and his assistant Irving Pinchel arrived as well, with Mr. Pinchel taking over the location shooting when Renoir went back to Hollywood, where of course most of the film was shot on sets.

It’s an unusual film, a precursor perhaps to Renoir’s “The Southerner” (1945) about Texas sharecroppers, which we’ll probably get around to sometime or other. In both, this esteemed French director, with an impressive body of work in French cinema behind him, and who was also the son of Impressionist painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir, tackles a brooding American landscape. The swamp, with its gothic imagery, is a place of escape and freedom, but also a claustrophobic prison, a place of gruesome death.

Dana Andrews plays a backcountry youth who loses his hound dog, Trouble, in the Okefenokee swamp. He goes after him and meets Walter Brennan, who has been hiding in the swamp for five years, a fugitive from justice. Brennan had been wrongly accused of murdering a man, and he escaped before hanging.

His ragamuffin daughter, played by Anne Baxter, is taken in by storekeeper Russell Simpson as a hired girl. She is no-account by virtue of her father being no-account. She and Dana brave the community’s censure when he buys her a dress and takes her to the square dance.

Mr. Andrews has his own problems with run-ins with his domineering father, played by Walter Huston. There are a few subplots to round out this poor, isolated community -- Mary Howard plays Walter Huston’s young second wife, who is being romantically pursued by a smarmy John Carradine, who is given protection by the bullying brothers Ward Bond and Guinn “Big Boy” Williams, who are actually the ones who committed the murder of which Walter Brennan is wrongly accused.

Did I mention there would be spoilers? No? Sorry.

It’s an interesting film both for Renoir’s perspective on American gothic, complete with the imagery of a skull atop a cross as a warning sign, and for it being Dana Andrews’ first leading role.

Andrews’s voice is what fascinates me most. He speaks his lines with his chin sunk into his chest, pushing the dialogue out of his body with a sound somewhere between growling and weeping. I know he was supposed to have a fine bass singing voice, but I never heard it. I can believe it listening to the fullness of his speech in this performance.

He doesn’t hunker down too much in a southern accent, though as a native southerner he could -- but that would make him stand out from everyone else in the community who do not speak with southern accents. Most especially the Massachusetts-bred Walter Brennan in his alligator skin clothing and his New England long vowels.

Andrews's emotions are raw and on the surface in this movie. In later roles he displayed that skillful knack of showing great depth of emotion under a surface of cool reserve, a man already burdened with too much baggage and afraid to acknowledge it. Here he conceals nothing. He is all joyful shout and angry bluster, yet it is not overacting. He is a young man of considerable pride who perhaps represents for Renoir the sunshine contrast to the dark swamp. His hair curling on his neck, his first bashful, then exuberant discovery of love for Anne Baxter, his physical energy in this film give us no foreshadowing of the haunted war vet, the gloomy private eye, the troubled police detective of future years.

Some of the scenes look straight out of a John Ford copybook -- the fiddle playing of “Red River Valley” at the square dance, and of course, the use of so many Ford regulars like Ward Bond, John Carradine and Russell Simpson.

Eugene Pallette is also along as the sheriff, whose otherwise jolly demeanor is a puzzle against the scene where he allows Ward Bond and “Big Boy” Williams to half drown Dana Andrews to force him to confess Walter Brennan’s whereabouts. It’s a bit of backcountry interrogation. Perhaps if he floats he will be declared a witch.

He and Walter Huston have a father-son reunion when Mr. Huston saves him.

Virginia Gilmore plays Mr. Andrews’s best girl, until she dumps him. Then her jealously over his attention to Anne Baxter drives her to accusing him of hiding the fugitive. She is smug, self-centered, manipulative, and dangerous.

The scenes at the dance are touching for the very way these folk observe courtly rules in contrast to their ragged best clothes and the rotting walls of the local meeting hall. I’ve been in swanky places where the manners were far worse.

They are proud people. It is pride that divides Dana Andrews from his Pa; pride that divides Walter Huston from his young wife, whom he thinks is seeing a man behind his back; pride which makes Dana shun his ratfink girlfriend; pride which makes him refuse to knuckle under Ward Bond. When his pal and surrogate father figure Walter Brennan accuses him of selling him out, it is his pride that makes Dana Andrews stand on purpose to take a bullet from Ward Bond to prove his innocence. More trial by ordeal.

And then back to gothic. There is a scene where “Big Boy” meets his demise in the swamp, slowly sucked up into a bog hole. It’s quite horrifying, and despite my fascination for bottomless pits in movies (see “Make Haste to Live” - 1954, here), I was amazed that the studio allowed Renoir’s fixed camera gaze on Williams screaming in terror as his disembodied head sinks into the mud. It’s something out of monster movie -- which would have been less terrifying because we do not believe in monsters -- than in a movie that has so far kept rigidly to unblinking reality.

Brennan lets a stunned Ward Bond live, to face the same hell he did as fugitive in the swamp. Their justice is crude, and final.

Another less horrifying, but cinematically striking scene is when John Carradine attempts to seduce Mary Howard, declaring his love for her while both are fairly tattooed with the mottled shadows of leaves that mask their expressions.

It’s an unusual film where character actors tell the tale. There are no stars, really, in this movie though certainly Walter Huston had a big name in film and theatre. The only star was the one yet to be -- Dana Andrews.

Drums Along the Mohawk - 1939

“Drums Along the Mohawk” (1939) leads us into our weekend celebrations of Independence Day, and is one of the few movies of Hollywood’s heyday to deal with the American Revolution. Surprisingly so, since one would expect that the intrigue and drama of the era, not to say the very patriotism of the theme, would lend itself to films of the day. Perhaps the studios perceived the subject was too remote, too far past to be appealing to modern audiences, the people and manners too colorless. Director John Ford’s vibrant movie does much to dispel the ideal that the forefathers were saintly heroes and the Revolution a foregone conclusion.

This early Technicolor film is beautifully shot, and the muted pastel tones are much more realistic and pleasing to look at than the garish “red shirt photography” of the 1940s musicals that would follow. The score is peppered with 18th century fife and drum music, and country fiddle tunes (and a liberal smattering of “In an English Country Garden” to designate the gentility of Claudette Colbert’s refined family heritage).

Henry Fonda and Claudette Colbert are frontier newlyweds when the frontier was still in New York. Fonda looks good in knee breeches and always looks authentic in period settings, no matter what the period. Claudette Colbert, even more like a porcelain doll in this rough setting of log cabin, appears as she always does; a loveliness of no certain age, but perhaps a bit too glamorous.

The movie is stolen outright by Edna May Oliver, who received an Oscar nomination for her role as the feisty widow who the young newlyweds come to work for as servants when the Indians burn their own homestead and crops to the ground.

The story is comprised of events, rather than a linear beginning, middle and conclusion. The frontier settlement, always battling the Indians, gets word of the colonists’ revolt against the English king. They think it’s a swell idea, and drill in ragtag formation, ready to fire upon any redcoats, but the British domination of North America in this movie is just John Carradine as a menacing Tory leading bands of Indians in waves against the township’s lonely fort.

Miss Colbert, the daughter of a fine family, must adjust to the roughhewn ways of her new neighbors and her new life. She and Fonda suffer privations and tragedies. Their bond, as actually occurred with many frontier couples, is strengthened from necessity of self reliance as much as from being in love.


There are humorous moments in the film, such as when the minister, Arthur Shields, half prays for and half reprimands a local girl for keeping company with a New Englander, “he’s a Massachusetts man, Lord, and Thou knowest no good can come of that.” He also prays for a man with the flux “real bad” and gives a commercial for a local merchant. And when he announces that the militia be formed, “Every man failing to report for duty will be promptly hanged. Amen.”

Ward Bond, another Ford regular, is the lusty, barrel-chested, booming-voiced bachelor who teases Edna May Oliver, and she gives it right back to him. John Ford always seemed to have given as much attention to the character actors as to the stars, which may be why they are so memorable in his films. At one point Bond, some 20 years her junior, playfully plants a kiss on a surprised Miss Oliver that, in its ferocity and very length is probably one of the most passionate kisses on the silver screen. I half expect that if the couple were Fonda and Colbert, the Code would not have allowed the kiss to last that long, but because the characters are supposed to be comic, Ford, and Bond and Oliver, get away with it.

But Edna May Oliver is more than just comic foil in this movie. She gets a chance to display her considerable dramatic talents, and the inherent drama in her each slight movement provides depth and texture to her role. Sometimes the ability to make a moment seem both comic and dramatic at the same time is like laying a perfect bunt down the third base line. It’s a thing of tantalizing beauty when it works.

Miss Oliver does this in such scenes as when Fonda is about to join a column of troops passing by her stone cottage, and she bids him goodbye first so that he can spend another few moments with his wife.

“I’m going to kiss you, so I better do it now so’s you won’t go off with the taste of a widow on your mouth.” Afterward, she comes indoors to keep from watching the men march away, reminded of her late husband, “Sometimes he’d wave…ten to one he didn’t even see me.” Her voice drops wearily, and the comic moment becomes tension-filled, and then simply philosophical.

Another moment finds both Colbert and Oliver on a porch at night, waiting for news of the battle. Colbert paces, finally is persuaded to sit on the step of the porch as Oliver, planted in a chair behind her, flaps a palmetto fan at mosquitoes. The contrast between the two actresses is interesting. Colbert is still, like a pristine statue, looking dreamily off. Miss Oliver hunches forward, her legs spread apart under her long skirts, resting her elbows on her knees, her chin on her hand in a brooding manner much less lady-like. She uses her whole body. Miss Oliver is living her role, while Miss Colbert is seems merely posed for the camera.

But the comedy is never too deeply buried, and bubbles up in Miss Oliver like a stream, as when the tobacco-chewing frontiersman comes to her door and tells her all families must flee to the fort. It’s a tense moment, but seeing he needs to spit his tobacco juice, Edna gets irritably practical,

“Go on and spit, man! Spit and get it over with!” She shoves him out the door so he can do so outside, and then mutters, trying to conceal her alarm about the approaching enemy, “Fool. He can’t even spit by himself.” In her crusty way, she is sensitive to life where Colbert is only hypersensitive to sounds and smells, and possible danger.

When Fonda and the troops march off in the distance, Colbert watches in the foreground, her back to us, from the rise of a sunny meadow. It’s a scene repeated in other Ford films like “She Wore a Yellow Ribbon” and “Fort Apache”, and “My Darling Clementine.”

The film turns from a study of frontier life to an action flick. Fonda, dragged from the rain and the mud, babbles to himself as he describes the gore of battle while Colbert tries to stop his bleeding and tries not to listen to him. It is her best scene where, distracted from posing, she appears most natural.

A man, sent to get help, is captured and tortured, and the horrified minister shoots him to keep him from suffering when the Indians burn him to death. Fonda is sent next to get help, and the women huddled in the fort don men’s uniforms to make the enemy think the fort is well defended by soldiers. This has precedence in many instances during the Revolution and in the French and Indian War when women took on a soldier’s role, sometimes donning soldier’s uniforms.

Even Daisy, Miss Oliver’s black house servant, dons a uniform and loads muskets. Edna May fires her gun, and takes an arrow in the chest, takes it like a man.

One wonders if the Indians were surprised that the “soldiers” were still wearing their frilly day caps underneath their tricorn hats.

The Indians depicted here are all “savages” except one; that is the character called Blue Back, played by Chief John Big Tree. He is a Christian convert, what were once called “praying Indians”, and so is friendly to the settlers. One could excuse Ford’s making the enemy Indians “savages” and the “good Indian” as the one who befriends the settlers, because that is how English-speaking settlers in the 18th century would have viewed the matter themselves. The year 1939, when this film was made, was too early for the revisionist history that attempts to make modern films on historical subjects less bigoted, if perhaps also sometimes less accurate in depicting the true (if sometimes repugnant) feelings of our ancestors.


However, Blue Back could have been a stronger, more well-rounded character, and Ford might have shown the immense conflict of what it must have been to have his feet planted in two different worlds. Unfortunately, Blue Back is little more than a clown who hollers “Hallelujah” at unexpected moments. Ironically, as a member of the Seneca nation, Chief John Big Tree is probably the most authentic link to the locale of the film.

The film ends with the fort being saved and the news that the British surrendered. That means the British lost the war. What they do not know, and the colonists all might have wondered for at least another generation, was who won the war? Who were the Americans?

John Ford brings the film to a rousing close with the strains of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” (which since those lyrics had not been written yet, was still “God Save the King”, an odd choice), and the camera pans on the Americans of this frontier outpost admiring the raising of their new American flag atop the church steeple. Separation of church and state hadn’t been invented yet.

The camera lingers on, among others, the smiling face of Daisy, the African-American servant of Edna May Oliver, played by Beulah Hall Jones (in the last of only a few films she made). Daisy could have been a freewoman, but at this time it is more likely she was a slave. Her expression of breathless hope and satisfaction looking at the new flag is quite surprisingly moving. The camera lingers on Chief John Big Tree, also admiring the flag. Is it Ford’s way of showing we’re all happy Americans now, or Ford’s subtle irony that “freedom” and “equality” would have to wait for some people? Flawed, and diverse, if not equal, they all take in the moment to celebrate the new nation.

I hope you can take a moment this weekend to celebrate it, too. By the way, among the flags that finale color guard is holding appears to be the flag of New England (see this post from my New England Travels blog). Apparently, the reverend’s warning against consorting with New Englanders (or perhaps only Massachusetts men) was suspended for the moment.

A Tale of Two Road Trips - Part 2

We see auto camps in “The Grapes of Wrath” as well, but they are more like concentration camps and Hoovervilles. In one desperate transient camp, the Joad family eats meager stew with guilt, while hungry children outside the tent watch them. Tom Joad, played by Henry Fonda, chases them away, but Ma Joad, played by Jane Darwell, lets them scrape the pot with sticks.

The extended Joad family leaves their foreclosed farm in Oklahoma for a possible better future in California. Their ramshackle farm truck is loaded to the gills with mattresses furniture, tied up with ropes. Wash tubs and suitcases dangle from ropes like Christmas tree ornaments. Like the boy and the mother on the bus in “It Happened One Night” they are dealing with a reality more desperate than running away from a rich father.

Their vehicle becomes their home. “Think it’ll hold?” Fonda asks, and the preacher, played by John Carradine replies, “If it does, it’ll be a miracle out of Scripture.” As desperate as they are, they invite the preacher, who is homeless himself, to join them.

We see Jane Darwell’s stricken, proud face through the windshield. We see a montage of highway city limit signs. Both grandparents die along the side of the road, held and comforted until they do.

The Joads pay 50 cents for a space at an auto camp. The meet (and sometimes flirt) with other travelers like them.

Mr. Malcolm, in his book on Route 1 notes, “The Romans, it has been noted, used roads to spread their culture. For Americans, it often seems, roads are their culture: tacky and beautiful, narrow and wide, straight and curvy, crowded and vacant, smoothed and potholed, scenic and cluttered.” We see America as it was in a bleak period, but where not everything is entirely bleak. Humanity is present even here.

The Joads’ route takes them to remote diners where a kindly short order cook allows them to buy a loaf of bread for 10 cents. A brassy waitress sells 10 cents worth of stick candy for two cents to them, and a couple of truckers leave her a big tip to reward her generosity.

They pass through harsh and beautiful desert country, by pueblos and Southwest Indians herding sheep. At a gas station, two uniformed attendants remark to each other, “Them Oakies ain’t got no sense and no feelings. They ain’t human. No human being would live the way they do. Human beings couldn’t stand to be so miserable.”

We see our old friend Ward Bond in this film, too. Not a surly bus driver this time, he is a friendly traffic cop, a fellow Oklahoman, who, with regret and embarrassment, must sharply warn them to keep moving through his town or they will be arrested.

The Joads’ trials are never-ending it seems, but they eventually come to a government-run auto camp that is clean and safe, and the showers “and things” are outside. The Joad children are thunderstruck by their first encounter with a flush toilet.

Though their struggles are far from over, there is still hopefulness at the end. These two films show the humanity of their adventures, vicariously our adventures, on these road trips. It is a world without cruise control. They have very little control at all.

Still, Ma Joad exclaims, “We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa, ‘cause we’re the people.” Once or twice the Joad family, and Gable and Colbert may glance in the rear view mirror, but they don’t dwell on what’s behind them.

That's all for this week. Have a great weekend. See you Monday.