Shiftless Jeeter Lester (Charley Grapewin) and his family of hillbilly stereotypes live in a rural backwater where their ancestors were once wealthy planters. Their slapstick existence is threatened by a bank’s plans to take over the land for more profitable farming; subplots involve the affairs and marriages of son Dude (William Tracy) and daughter Ellie May (Gene Tierney).
Joseph McBride, Searching for John Ford wrote:
Ford revisited — and parodied — the themes and milieu of The Grapes of Wrath a year later in Tobacco Road, Fox’s film version of Erskine Caldwell’s 1932 novel and the long-running stage adaptation by Jack Kirkland. Unlike Steinbeck’s novel, Caldwell’s revels in the comedy and pathos of proletarian defeatism. Ford evidently welcomed the opportunity to unwind from the liberal gravitas of The Grapes of Wrath with this bizarre divertissement about a decadent white-trash family in rural Georgia. Starring Charley Grapewin as the shiftless and raucous old farmer Jeeter Lester, Tobacco Road looks like something Ford would have made on a drunken bender, interrupted by crying jags and bouts of hymn singing (“Brighten the Corner Where You Are”). Schizoid in the extreme, it alternates between the crudest, most grating low-comedy scenes Ford ever directed and some deftly sketched moments of sentiment as moving as any he ever put on the screen.
Andrew Sarris writes that Ford transformed Jeeter “from a greedy animal to a seedy but serious mainstay of tradition.” True enough, for Grapewin’s wonderful performance enriches and ennobles a character that could have been merely a caricature. The elegiac montage of Jeeter and his wife, Ada (Elizabeth Patterson), leaving the land to make their way to the poorhouse is heartbreakingly beautiful, the melancholy stillness of Fords compositions lit with late-afternoon chiaroscuro by the masterful Arthur C. Miller. But for the director of The Grapes of Wrath to stoop to ridiculing impoverished sharecroppers as lazy and stupid, as Ford does throughout much of Tobacco Road, is inexcusable. William Tracy’s hideous screeching as the moronic Dude Lester and the embarrassing spectacle of Ward Bond and Gene Tierney writhing toward each other in the dirt to convey sexual passion are among the lowest points in Ford’s oeuvre.
It’s almost as if Tobacco Road were directed by Ford’s evil twin, the dark-hearted mess he became whenever he crawled into his sleeping bag between pictures to drink himself incoherent. Nunnally Johnson, who wrote the screenplay for Tobacco Road, correctly described it as a “fiasco.”
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