Ten Movies That Shook Wanniski
Memo To - Website browsers, fans & clients >From - Jude Wanniski http://www.polyconomics.com Re - #6 "The Grapes of Wrath"
Continuing with the "movie list," here is number six of the ten films that most shaped my life. These are not my favorite films. They are the movies I've seen that have had the greatest influence on my thinking, my character, my life. Some are favorites that I enjoy watching over and over again, which you can tell as you read each entry. Try to think of your own experiences with films and how they influenced the course of your life. It makes life more interesting to be aware, as you live it, to know how things such as books and films and magazine articles alter your path in significant ways. Sometime last year the Sunday NYTimes "Arts and Leisure" section had a piece on how difficult it is to think of a movie that may have changed history. The only movie they could think of was a silent film by D.W. Griffith, Birth of a Nation, which had a scene about the KuKluxKlan that the author believes changed national thinking about the KKK. How silly. Each of the ten films listed here changed my history, and if I had not seen them, I would not have helped change history in the ways that I have. Films don't move masses. They move individuals who move masses.
6. "The Grapes of Wrath" (1940) I was only four when this Henry Fonda flick hit the silver screen, and I rather doubt I saw it then, but did see it the first of many times before I was 10. Fonda was my maternal grandmother's favorite actor, not least because he almost always played a fellow who tried to help the poor folks and bravely confronted social injustice. (Note he also stars in Movie #1 on my list, "The Ox-Bow Incident." "Grapes of Wrath" is a Great Depression story, about down-and-out Okies leaving the dustbowl in search of the land-of-milk-and-honey in California in a rickety truck. They encounter ups and downs along the way and find the going rough even when they get to California. The scene that hit me hardest, as a little kid, takes place in a highway diner where they stop to buy half a loaf of bread, as I recall. One of the little Okie kids asks a waitress for a penny candy, because that's all he has. She looks at the ragamuffin and sells him a candy, while two husky truckdrivers look on waiting to pay their bill. They tip her a dollar, with one telling the waitress that he knows the candy she gave the kid cost a nickel. As the men walk out, she shakes her head and smiles: "Truckdrivers!" From that moment,it's a film moment that still occasionally inspires me to sudden impulses of generosity and a definite bias toward the Teamsters Union.
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