The Grapes of Wrath is an iconic 1940 film that brought together giants of their genres: John Ford, the most acclaimed director of his time, John Steinbeck, who wrote the bestselling novel of the same name, and Darryl Zanuck, Hollywood’s preeminent producer. The end product was pure Americana.
It is with the perspective of this film from more than 80 years ago that we should approach this year’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which brings together Martin Scorsese, Robert De Niro, and Leonardo DiCaprio.
Where these two intensely political, election-year films about Oklahoma families overlap, and where they differ, tells us much about our moment in time.
The Grapes of Wrath told the tale of the Joad family, hardscrabble Oklahoma farmers who lost everything in the Dust Bowl and the Great Depression of the 1930s, and trekked to California in vain search for a better life. In many ways, these hard-working Okies turned California into the Golden State that it was until recently — a story that now seems lost.
The Grapes of Wrath was also pure propaganda. It was, at best, agitprop for President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal, and, at worst, for central planning and perhaps even socialism.
Ford was a Republican, but an FDR-loving one, while Steinbeck was, according to many, a socialist, if not an outright communist sympathizer.
The Joads were clear victims of capitalism, first of hardhearted bankers, who foreclosed on their Oklahoma farm, and then of equally ruthless farm owners along the way, who paid them a pittance to pick their crops.
The only breaks the Joads ever catch come in the government-run Weedpatch Camp, officially the Arvin Farm Labor Supply Center created by FDR’s New Deal. The supposedly scheming rapaciousness of the market system was absent in this well-run facility. Jim Rawley, the kind camp manager, visits Ma Joad and treats her with dignity, making her “feel like people again.”
Not for nothing did Joseph Stalin allow the movie to be shown in the Soviet Union. That is, until moviegoing Soviet audiences realized that poor Americans — even the Joads! — owned their own cars.
For all that, The Grapes of Wrath is kind to America. The film showed it to be a land of good people, who worked hard and were caring to one another, if a little rough around the edges. The Joads, and the other victims of capitalism around them, were the salt of the earth.
No reviewer better caught the dichotomy in the movie than Whittaker Chambers of Time magazine. Chambers had been a communist true believer and a spy for the Soviet Union. But, as Time itself put it on the 75th anniversary of the film, “Riven by news of the 1938 Moscow trials, Chambers defected from the Party and was hired by TIME. Toward the end of his tenure as Senior Editor, he was the star witness testifying against Alger Hiss in the most prominent espionage trial of the postwar years.”
Before gaining all this notoriety, Chambers celebrated the movie’s achievements, while understanding, because of his own past, the agitprop part.
“Pinkos, who did not bat an eye when the Soviet Government exterminated 3,000,000 peasants by famine, will go for a good cry over the hardships of the Okies,” Chambers wrote caustically on Feb. 12, 1940. “But people who go to pictures for the sake of seeing pictures will see a great one. For ’The Grapes of Wrath’ is possibly the best picture ever made from a so-so book.”
Nobody will ever say Killers of the Flower Moon is the best picture ever made, but this 3-1/2-hour behemoth is also agitprop for the federal administrative state, and it comes in a year when the viability of this unconstitutional, so-called fourth branch of government is very much on the ballot.
Like The Grapes of Wrath, Killers of the Flower Moon (and, warning, these descriptions may constitute spoilers) shows a benevolent federal government ready to save Americans from the depredations of greedy capitalists.
Just as The Grapes of Wrath depicted the Okies of the 1930s, Killers of the Flower Moon tells the tale of the Osage tribe of Oklahoma, which, in the early 1900s, inherited the oil that lay beneath their reservation. As Rolling Stone put it, the movie is about a “Reign of Terror — when white settlers in 1920s Oklahoma, led by (William) Hale (played by De Niro), systematically married and murdered wealthy Osage Nation tribal members for the headrights to their oil-rich land.”
Riding in to save the Osage from white devils are agents working for the precursor of the FBI, who solve the murders, and federal nurses, who save DiCaprio’s Osage wife from his attempts at poisoning her.
But because it’s very woke, Killers of the Flower Moon goes out of its way to make sure that this movie about real events is not about “white saviors.” The agents and nurses are “allies,” perhaps, though woke ideology is never very clear about where the line between the two stands. But Killers of the Flower Moon self-consciously takes away the individuality of the main FBI agent, unlike a 1959 movie on the same event. It’s the bureaucracy that saves the Osage.
Rolling Stone rightly calls the movie “an anti-Western,” as other reviewers have, for that is what it is. If The Grapes of Wrath left audiences feeling good about America, Killers of the Flower Moon exerts itself to make the audience ashamed of the country and its history.
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But, mind you, the movie is really about the present. As Rolling Stone points out, “Robert De Niro’s number one priority is getting rid of Trump.” As he told the magazine, if former President Donald Trump gets elected, he will try to do something about the “deep state,” which to De Niro is simply “protection from him.”
The FBI, the Justice Department, and other federal agencies, law enforcement or not, will be on the ballot this year — as will be the battling views of America as fundamentally good or as a rapacious plot to maintain white supremacy. Don’t expect to escape it at the movies.
Mike Gonzalez is a senior fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the author of BLM: The Making of a New Marxist Revolution.
