Last night I was in the mood for a black and white movie (I’m sick of color, with all its sneering “nuance”), so I threw in the newly remastered Fox Studio Classics DVD of John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, directed by John Ford and starring Henry Fonda.

Good movie, if a bit heavy on the melodrama (every Okie is streaked with dirt and wears a rough five-o’clock shadow, including the women and children, oddly enough), but what makes the DVD such a steal at $11 (moreso than the beautiful restoration, which alone justifies the price) are the extras — particularly the optional director’s cut, which includes a never-before-seen alternate ending in which Tom Joad takes his meager wages, saves them up, and — along with a man named Noah Cross — begins buying water-starved farmland out from under struggling farmers in California’s parched San Fernando Valley at depressed prices. Both Joad and Cross later become fabulously wealthy when the drought mysteriously lifts and land values increase ten fold. (A postscript then makes mention of a “Jake Gittes,” but I had no idea what to make of that — and besides, I was still all teary-eyed from the Joad’s stunning reversal of furtune: Ma Joad in fox stole with long ivory-etched cigarette holder, Pa in top hat and spats, swinging his gold-tipped walking stick, the children off to Eton…)

I’m not sure Steinbeck ever saw Ford’s revisioning of the novel, nor am I convinced he would have liked it if he had, but I sure did. I mean, everybody loves a happy ending, right? And to see Tom Joad spreading cavier on a melba round? Well, it just made this ol’ saps’ heart sing.

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