Oh, I think that the acceptance of rural poverty and all the indignities that went with it that I witnessed as a kid affected my appreciation for this film. Just to give you some sense of how it was in the small village where my father and his brother had a produce brokerage serving all the big cities, I'll cite a few examples to illustrate how it was. On two occasions, he discovered employees and their families living in a hole in the ground with a sheet of plywood over it for protection. This was in the Fall. The children were not in school, in part because they had no proper shoes or clothes to wear. He had to persuade the parents to move into a more permanent shelter he found for them and send their kids to school. One of the workers voiced a common belief--that it was a "waste of time" to educate the girls, since they were just going to get married and the boys were needed to help in the fields. Other families of seasonal workers asked my mother to shop for groceries for them, since the wives were too ashamed to go to town in their ragged clothes and there were markets where prices changed when migrant workers appeared. When my Dad found some decent little shacks, had them refurbished with running water and had his men and their families live there, he was threatened with fire bombings, (there were two suspicious fires at his warehouse around the same time.) When he used to encourage men to borrow his company's trucks on weekends to do some errands for their families, a late night phone call usually came, notifying him that "One of your n******* has just been picked up after stealing your truck." This was not in the rural South, but upstate New York in the early '60s. My father and mother did what they could as individuals and through some of the few charities that existed at the time to help, and never believed that anyone would want to live like the people in Tobacco Road, but might do so out of ignorance, disease or inbreeding, all of which flourished in this unhealthy setting.movieman1957 wrote:I am not quite sure the rural poverty had anything to do with your outlook. They are all, in that family, presented as stupid, lazy, sloppy, and in anyway imaginable, useless people. They hardly have anything to redeem themselves. They wonder why their children never come to visit. Lord knows when the last time they went to the creek to clean up. (Jeeter does throw some water and let it land on his head.)
Having just been through his opus with the Joad family and all the things they did to try and make a better life for the family it is odd that he would find one so resigned to their own poverty. Even when given a reprieve it is obvious at the last scene they will squander that as well.
It also makes the brilliant but heartbreaking The Grapes of Wrath even harder to see or to read. It wasn't "just a movie", unfortunately.
I saw Willie Comes Marching Home too and thought it terribly old fashioned and lifeless in many ways. I don't think that Ford really was involved in the story or characters as he usually was in his better films. Perhaps it might have seemed a better movie if a Preston Sturges had tackled it, though he already made that one in Hail the Conquering Hero (1944).movieman1957 wrote:Haven't seen "The Sun Shines Bright." Not that you asked but I saw "When Willie Comes Marching Home" and that is ok but nothing to write home about.
