Tobacco Road

John Ford's great 1940 classic is with us once more--this time without its inevitable companion feature, Grapes of Wrath. For those who have missed the film the first twenty-three times around, Tobacco Road, based on a novel by Erskine Caldwell, concerns a poor-white Georgia dirt farmer named Jeeter Lester who tries to dig up $100 so he can keep his depression-haunted homestead out of the clutches of the bank. Not a man of boundless energy, Jeeter's attempts to secure the money, which include the theft of his son's car, turn out to be more or less unsuccessful, though at the end he does manage to stay on at his farm for a while.

If some of the picture's social commentary has palled a bit in sixteen years, it does get in some splendid and appropriate thrusts at the blessings of hymn-singing religion. Fortunately, also, the lasting success of the film rests less on its satire than on some first-rate performances and photography. Ford's cameras concentrate on the poverty and squalor of the region. But in a few shots such as one of a fence outlined against the sky, the countryside is transformed and becomes almost beautiful.

As far as the acting is concerned, the picture is almost a one-man show: it belongs to Charley Grapewin, who plays Jeeter. While some of the other performers, such as Gene Tierney and Dana Andrews, are better know today, Grapewin's part overshadows theirs both by its size and the capability with which it is handled Alternately sly and humerous, his Jeeter is a captivating old man who in one monologue--a prayer in which he warns the Lord to hurry up with delivering help or beware of the consequences--achieves something approaching magnificence. And Grapewin's performance, unlike some other aspects of the picture, never slides down into bathos. On the whole it is good to have him and Tobacco Road back again.