It could only happen in Hollywood. They buy the rights to a Steinbeck novel about Mexicans and Portuguese in California and put all white actors in the cast.
Now, maybe I can buy Hedy Lamarr as a Portuguese beauty, but Spenser Tracy and John Garfield as Mexicans? Ludicrous casting, especially when the story is so ethnic.
But, maybe it was genius as common stereotypes about Afro- and Mexican-Americans are played out in the form of Tracy, as a shiftless bum who mooches off his friends and manipulates them into providing him with wine and a roof over his head. Pilon (Tracy) is not interested in satisfying anything but his own belly and even goes after a poor wood-seller called The Pirate, in the form of Frank Morgan, who, in a Scorcese moment, got the Oscar nomination he should have gotten three years earlier for The Wizard of Oz.
Lamarr was as beautiful as ever, and John Garfield did a great job as her pursuer, even as he had to avoid complete ruin from the machinations of Pilon.
Now, maybe I can buy Hedy Lamarr as a Portuguese beauty, but Spenser Tracy and John Garfield as Mexicans? Ludicrous casting, especially when the story is so ethnic.
But, maybe it was genius as common stereotypes about Afro- and Mexican-Americans are played out in the form of Tracy, as a shiftless bum who mooches off his friends and manipulates them into providing him with wine and a roof over his head. Pilon (Tracy) is not interested in satisfying anything but his own belly and even goes after a poor wood-seller called The Pirate, in the form of Frank Morgan, who, in a Scorcese moment, got the Oscar nomination he should have gotten three years earlier for The Wizard of Oz.
Lamarr was as beautiful as ever, and John Garfield did a great job as her pursuer, even as he had to avoid complete ruin from the machinations of Pilon.