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.

Curiosities & Time Capsules -- This Crooner Is For Hire

Suddenly (1954, Lewis Allen) *****


“Tonight at five o'clock I kill the President. One-second after five there's a new President. What changes? Nothing!”


Often described as a film noir, I think of Suddenly as a tight B-movie capturing Frank Sinatra on the upswing of his show business comeback - a foreshadowing of things to come for both Frank and the rest of us.
Smack in-between the two seminal events of Sinatra’s comeback from the show business junkyard; the Oscar for From Here To Eternity and releasing the single Young At Heart (cut with his new arranger Nelson Riddle), Suddenly was released in October of 1954 by United Artists.
I first saw this as a public domain VHS tape on sale at a video store for a buck or two. Sinatra movies have always held special interest for me, as my mother was a fan; but Suddenly slipped through my television experience.
The best “B-movies” have their own cosmology. Each one exists in a cosmos where the most improbable of coincidences make perfect sense and the inevitable climatic twist (or surprise) is foreshadowed at the beginning. Suddenly has such a marker in its first few minutes and delivers quite a wallop at the end. Moreover like the perfect “B-picture” it satisfies and makes one want to come back for more.
The action takes place, in real time, in a small California town called Suddenly –


First Driver: [stops car to ask for directions] Officer, can you tell me the way to Three Rivers? 

Slim Adams: About two miles to the first main intersection, then turn left. It's about sixty miles. 

First Driver: Thanks. What town is this?
Slim Adams: Suddenly. 

First Driver: Suddenly what?
Slim Adams: No no. That's the name. 

First Driver: [laughs] That's a funny name for a town.
Slim Adams: Uh huh. Hangover from the old days. That's the way things used to happen here: suddenly.
First Driver: I see.
Slim Adams: Road agent, gamblers, gunfighters.
First Driver: Well, I take it things have changed. 

Slim Adams: Uh huh. Things happen so slow now, the town council is figuring to change the name to Gradually. 

First Driver: [laughs] Thanks, officer. 
[begins to drive away] 

Slim Adams: Pleasure. Come back.


Suddenly is the quintessential 1950s small American town. Where everyone knows everyone and all play by the rules. It has a main street where everyone shops and a grocery store just up the block from the toy store where you can buy a six-bit toy gun.
Microscopic in its detail of character Suddenly opens showing us just how the small town operates along the main drag over looked by a small house on the hill that will be stage for the main action of the film.
Despite wearing the familiar fedora this is not the affable Frank of the MGM years. After playing streetwise character of Pvt. Angelo Maggio, Suddenly provides the training wheels for future anti-hero film roles. Frank plays John Baron a sociopath turned psychotic during WW2. Barton is forever boasting about the Silver Star he won for being a “successful killer of Gerrys. “I did a lot of chopping in the last war…” he brags (it’s interesting he doesn’t acknowledge Korea). In peacetime he has turned gun for hire with the President of United States as his current target. Whether he works for the mob (or better the National Crime Syndicate identified in the recent Kefauver Hearings) or as a specter, hired by a foreign government (located behind the Iron Curtain). We are never told.

Sinatra is amazing is his ability to unwind his character - in real time - from credible G-man conning his way into the lives of innocents to a full-on psychotic monster. Frank goes full throttle in his ease to violence and comfort in his sadistic cruelty. His smile when kicking the sheriff in his recently broken arm is uncomfortably reminiscent of Richard Widmark pushing the old lady in a wheel chair down the stairs in Kiss of Death.
Sterling Haden shares above the title billing, playing against his hard-boiled film noir type as the sheriff who is willing to sacrifice all for the life of this commander-in-chief. A red blooded American through and through.
Hayden’s career seemed to be back on track having ditched the notion that he was a communist sympathizer (after his real life WWII heroics in Yugoslavia – and metal from Tito). He made five films in 1954; most notably Johnny Guitar (d. Nichols Ray). It can only be described as a gender-bender of a western, with Hayden playing second banana to Joan Crawford; it’s impossible to tell who was more macho.
Standing six-feet five-inches tall Hayden towers over Sinatra when side-by-side but in close-ups and full frame shots Sinatra dominates until the inevitable climax.
Just as important as its strong thematic connection to The Manchurian Candidate, Suddenly demonstrates Sinatra’s desire to risk making movies with controversial subject matter. His next Oscar nomination was in 1955 for The Man With the Golden Arm and he very much wanted to make a movie about the execution of Private Slovik (the only American executed for desertion during the second world war) written by blacklisted screenwriter Albert Maltz in 1960. Wikipedia advises that as Sinatra was campaigning for John F. Kennedy for President, the Kennedy camp was naturally concerned, and ultimately persuaded Sinatra to cancel the project. Which is ironic in that it was JFK’s encouragement that persuaded Sinatra to make The Manchurian Candidate in 1962.
Since first watching it I have always been drawn to Suddenly. I’m not sure why. It may be how perfectly in time it follows the Kefauver hearings into organized crime and Sinatra’s real life relationships with key mobsters. Or it maybe because it anticipates the importance of the mob in electing JFK (with Frank as conduit). And there is the matter of the mob being involved in President's assassination. But mostly it's the urban legend that Oswald watched Suddenly on local television before that fateful day in Dallas. Isn’t that why the movie was withdrawn like The Manchurian Candidate isn’t it? That did happen didn’t it?


As a side show it’s interesting to note that Hayden actually won a Silver Star in the war and Sinatra never severed in the military.