The American Myth/John Ford’s Forgotten Movie and acceptable stereotypes.

Tobacco Road (1941, John Ford) **

An often-overlooked John Ford film, Tobacco Road is based on a wildly successful novel by Erskine Caldwell, who published over 25 novels and sold over 80 million books in his lifetime. Tobacco Road’s success extended to Broadway (eight plus years and 3,182 performances) where it was still running when the 20th Century Fox film was released. The play was revived in 1942, 1943 and 1950. The original Broadway production is the sixteenth longest running show ever. The play was ban in England until 1949.

The controversy and success of the book and play, created a bidding war among the studios for the motion picture rights – even though the Hay’s Office had practically declared the play and its content “unsuitable for motion pictures.” RKO was Darryl F. Zanuck’s chief rival for the rights and was promising the role of Jeeter to Charles Laughton. Henry Fonda was even mentioned for the role as was the more age appropriate Walter Brennan.

Zanuck’s rushed the movie version to capitalize on the title’s momentum especially hard because as always, Fox was in need of a hit. And John Ford was one of the most reliable directors in the business, having just won an Oscar for The Grapes of Wrath the previous year for the studio. This made him the logical project for the high profile project.

Again Ford worked Nunnally Johnson as screenwriter, but this time (at Zanuck’s direction) they concocted the film as the broadest of Ford’s comedies, retaining none of the original story’s earthiness, social realism or relevance. Erskine Caldwell disavowed himself of having anything to do with the movie.

After it’s release Time Magazine complained that the stage version was a “case study in degeneracy”, and was turned by Hollywood into “a slow, sentimental account of Jeeter's aged life and times.” The review went on to say, “In giving the disheveled story a moral scrubbing, a bath of pathos and a sort of happy ending. Hollywood has rubbed off its sharp edges of character and depraved psychology.” The always, outstanding blog, Shooting Down Pictures provides an excellent review of the film’s critical reception.

It is interesting to note that in the popular biography “Pappy: The Life of John Ford” written by Ford’s grandson Tobacco Road is never mentioned. It’s also conspicuously absent from Mel Gussow’s biography of Darryl Zanuck “Don’t Say Yes Until I Finish Talking.”

Film maker Lindsay Anderson captured Tobacco Road on film, perhaps better than anyone, when he wrote: “The whole of Tobacco Road, which for the extraordinary balance and control of its continual variations of mood – wistfully elegiac and wildly slapstick, cruelly satirical and tenderly sentimental – constitutes perhaps the most sheerly virtuoso performance of Ford’s career.”


Tobacco Road is set in a proverbial Georgia backwater at the height of the Great Depression where abject poverty is the order of the day. As for progress nothing much has happened since the end of the Civil War.

It’s important to know that Ford cast Charley Grapewin as Jeeter Lester to reprise his role in the Broadway production. Otherwise it might seem that Grapewin was channeling his earlier role as Grandpa in Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath. Jeeter is a shiftless conniver and patriarch who must secure the money to pay the mortgage on the old homestead or be packed off with Ma to the “poor farm”.

Best (and most relevant today) quote, “I don’t own it, you don’ own it. Now the bank owns it and they didn’t have anything to do with building it”.

The Lester family resembles every “hillbilly” stereotype imaginable. The Lester’s are rural poor, white and uneducated. They have been maligned and ridiculed in various forms for the better part of the 20th century – “The Beverly Hillbillies”, Li’l Abner, Ma and Pa Kettle and Deliverance. This may well be Ford foreshadowing Tennessee William’s Baby Doll (directed on the screen by Elia Kazan).

Ford takes full advantage of the hillbilly motif and plays it for laughs with a heavy helping of sexual innuendo. That comes in the form of Gene Tierney (years before Laura and Leave Her To Heaven). Here she plays Ellie May,  Jeeter’s daughter; who by all suggestion (in the words of my mother) is a sexpot.

When this movie was made, lampooning people like these folks was “fair game”. Today they would be described as “rural down scale white working class voters” – the same as the target of Lyndon Johnson’s failed “War on Poverty” in the early 1960’s.

In a broad episode, Jeeter’s son Dude (William Tracy) marries a “somewhat touched” Sister Bessie (Marjorie Rambeau), who breaks out into full-blown gospel hymn (“Bringing in the Sheep”, “Onward Christian Soldiers”) at the drop of a hat. Bessie may be touched but she is full throttle forward for Jeeter’s son, even buying him car as part of her dowry for marrying the boy of 20. She admits to being 39. Dude pretty much wreaks the car on their way back home. But no matter, the horn still works.

Are these the people who Obama was talking about with his “cling to their guns or religion” remark during the campaign?

John Ford however has affection for these characters and has Arthur Miller photograph them with the same luscious care and beautiful cinematography as he did for How Green Was My Valley and Young Mr. Lincoln.

I first saw this late one Saturday night on The Fabulous 52 with my dad. I couldn’t have been more than 12 or 13. My dad remembered the movie from his youth. We laughed our heads off. Maybe that’s what Ford wanted us to do – otherwise it would be too sad.

The film closes with Jeeter falling asleep on his porch after bragging about his plans for tomorrow. “I can just tell by the way it smells this is going to be a great year for cotton.” One gets the strong sense that tomorrow never comes for Jeeter and Ma.