Tobacco Road (1941)
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- Synopsis:
In Georgia, near to the Savannah River, the lazy and crook hillbilly Jeeter Lester (Charley Grapewin) lives in the Tobacco Road with his wife Ada (Elizabeth Patterson), his son Dude (William Tracy) and his single daughter Ellie May (Gene Tierney) in a very poor condition. When the bank decides to take over his land, the banker George Payne (Grant Mitchell) is convinced by his friend Capt. Tim Harmon (Dana Andrews) to lease the land to Jeeter for US$ 100.00 per year. Jeeter plots a means to loan the amount from the widow Sister Bessie Rice (Marjorie Rambeau) that has just received U$ 800.00 from the life insurance company. However, Bessie decides to get married with Dude and uses the money to buy a brand new car for Dude. Jeeter plots a means to sell her car while he tries to marry Ellie May with his son-in-law Lov Bensey (Ward Bond) that was left by his wife. - Actors:
- Charley Grapewin, Gene Tierney, Marjorie Rambeau, William Tracy, Elizabeth Patterson, Dana Andrews, Slim Summerville, Ward Bond, Grant Mitchell, Zeffie Tilbury, Russell Simpson, Spencer Charters, Irving Bacon, Harry Tyler, Charles Halton
- Directors:
- John Ford
- Writers:
- Erskine Caldwell, Jack Kirkland
- Genres:
- Classics, Comedy, Drama
- Collections:
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Reviews (1) of Tobacco Road
A TASTE FOR RAW TURNIPS - Tobacco Road review by CH
How widely is Erskine Caldwell read nowadays? He died as recently as 1987 (which is in fact thirty-four years ago) but is fixed in the mind as a chronicler of the Depression with Tobacco Road. Set in the wild country of Georgia, it depicts a family hard pressed to grow anything.
The novel soon became a long-running Broadway play and was bought by Twentieth Century-Fox. Anybody coming to the work through this 1941 film could be excused for thinking it an instalment of The Beverley Hillbillies. From the off, we find the indolent, turnip-chewing father Charlie Grapewin at the wheel of a jalopy with a tendency to crash through fences on the journey back to the tumbledown homestead across barren land which has not provided sustenance in a long while. Despite such privation, Gene Tierney, given to crawling across the ground, looks ravishing: she could get up on stage and solve the family's problems with one flicker of the eyelid.
In the event, things get even worse. The rent unpaid, the bank wants this woe-begone property. What remains of the family can either go to toil on the poor farm or join the many other children at work in a city mill.
Another surprise is to find that all this was directed by John Ford who, two years earlier, had made that supreme Depression film The Grapes of Wrath. Where that was harrowing, this is poor farce, one crack-brained scheme following another - such as filling a woman preacher's new, $800 automobile with logs and driving to sell them.
Many the moment when one wants to close one's eyes on this spectacle (in which Gene Tierney appears but briefly as does potential saviour Dana Andrews) - and listen to David Buttolph's fine music which, with many a country jangle, fits the landscape so well.