The lightest of heart and most lightly regarded classic John Steinbeck adaptation, “Tortilla Flat” (1942) came by its “underrated comedy” reputation with the passing years.
It’s an ethnic farce by a writer with an eye, ear and empathy for the underclasses. But Steinbeck wasn’t Latino. And whatever his espoused opinions on “prejudice,” racial stereotypes riddle his fiction.
MGM, which filmed this adaptation with “Gone with the Wind” mainstay Victor Fleming behind the camera, didn’t have many Latin American performers on its payroll, and didn’t reach out to Cesar Romero, Dolores del Rio or Ramon Novarro, or “discover” Fernando Lamas, whose movie career began the same year “Tortilla Flat” was turned into a film.
Watching the film anew, I was struck by all the decades of conflicted reactions to Steinbeck’s depiction of the “paisanos” living on the fringes of Monterey at its fishing town peak could have been avoided had Anthony Quinn been cast in the lead instead of Spencer Tracy in brown face. Quinn was just emerging as a character actor “star,” and he’d have been perfect. PERFECT.
Tracy, who’d played “a Portagee” in “Captains Courageous” and would go on to take the Cuban fisherman title role in “The Old Man and the Sea,” gives a canny and sympathetic performance as the rascal Pilon, a homeless master manipulator and dedicated avoider of hard work in “Tortilla Flat.” But hearing his Spanglish and seeing his face next to the likes of Frank Morgan (“The Wizard of Oz”), Sheldon Leonard (“It’s a Wonderful Life”) and John Ford’s favorite “By yimminy” Norwegian John Qualen in skin-darkening makeup is jarring enough to take you out of the movie.
The characterizations, depicting a community of descendents of the original European settlers to California, and more recent arrivals — Mexican, Central American, and Chinese — teeter on the edge of straight-up stereotypes. There are righteous, hard-working women, good Catholics and the lazy, shiftless unhoused who’d rather siesta, finagle or swipe that next jug of wine than fish or cut bait.
A viewer coming to the film today has to rationalize the fact that the attitudes of the time that made the film were odious, even in liberal Hollywood, and that Steinbeck wrote “Viva Zapata!” and “The Grapes of Wrath” as well as “Of Mice and Men,” which oversimplified disabilities and “East of Eden,” which featured racist characters.
We’re in “Cannery Row” country in “Tortilla Flat,” the hills and woods overlooking Monterey and the sea, and the canneries and fishing boats that employed so many there through the 1940s.
Pilon (Tracy) is the sweet-talking, laid back hustler content to sleep in the open with his flunky Pablo (Akim Tamiroff), always with an eye out for the next bottle of wine or free meal. The kids love Pilon, and the ladies tolerate his sweet-talking charms.
But when they cross paths with a gringo lawyer (Donald Meek of “Stagecoach”), we figure out very quickly that Danny (John Garfield), whom they direct the lawyer to, would be well-advised to steel himself to all the complaints that his “good friends” stir up once they figure out why the lawyer needs to find him.
Danny’s grandfather has died and left him two houses in town. Danny’s in jail, but to a sweet-talker Pilon, that is a mere formality. Soon the jailor (Leonard, later a famous TV producer of “The Andy Griffith Show” and the like) joins Danny and his friends as they visit the properties and Pilon plots a way to throw a party. Trade this for wine, that for groceries, “borrow” this or that, taunt fishermen until they throw mackeral at you, sweetalk the widow next door out of water to clean and cook the mackeral.
“It is strange,” Pilon equivocates to manipulate Danny. “When a man is poor, he thinks to himself, “If I had money, I would share it with my friends.” Then the money comes and his beautiful thoughts fly away. He forgets his friends – who shared things with him when he was poor.”
It’s no wonder Danny and Pablo and jailer Tito (Leonard) and fellow tipplers Jose Maria (Qualen) and Portagee Joe (Allen Jenkins) are easy pawns for Pilon’s schemes.
But the pretty new lass from Salinas (Hedy Lamarr) isn’t fooled by Pilon’s conniving charm, and she’s not moved by Danny’s rough and handsy courting. He’ll have to spend money to impress her, get a job, look like a real prospect.
Pilon’s “She’s a Portagee girl. Portagee girls are no good...They’re They ALWAYS want to get married!” warnings notwithstanding, Danny is smitten.
As he tries to win her affection, Pilon is gathering more and more “friends” for more and more parties, outfoxing his mates as he “rents” one of the inherited houses and ponders the wealth of the village madman, The Pirate (Morgan), who lives with five dogs in an old henhouse on the edge of the woods.
The Pirate collects and sells firewood and never spends a cent. Pilon and his crew greedily consider what it will take to find and steal that stash.
The scheming, thieving and general japery of these rogues is contrasted with their empathy — they scramble to feed a stranger (Tito Renaldo, the rare Latino in the cast) and his motherless infant who are passing through — and their piety. The Pirate is a devout Catholic who has made a promise to St. Francis of Assisi.
Not everyone in this world is “paisano” or “Portagee.” There’s a gringo doctor who ponders how the kids can be so healthy with such fine teeth on a diet of beans and tortillas, and Dolores from Salinas has a white grocer-suitor.
And not everyone in the cast is in brown-face makeup. Garfield and Lamarr don’t wear it, for reasons scriptural (She is Portugeuse) and perhaps contractual. The fact that it probably never occurred to MGM’s leadership to not paint up their payroll and instead cast this picture with culturally appropriate actors hardly seems a defense.
The film’s sentimentality is, like its tone-deafness on race. wholly in step with its time. You can write off the picture, with good reason, for patronizing characterizations and corny attempts at Latin wisdom.
“They say that a little love is like a little wine. Too much of either makes a man sick.”
But the black and white production design, blending backlots, rear-projection of docks and passing boats and painted glass shots of forests, the distant town and the like, is beautifully realized. The performances are shot through with a sweetness that excuses some of the lapses into caricature.
And whatever prejudices Steinbeck was filtering, parroting or trying to see past, there’s no denying this aimless little slice of sentimentalized poverty has its warmth and charm. Tracy is dry and amusing, Lamarr earthy, Garfield his most hotheaded and Morgan sweet and saintly, as we’d hope any addled homeless man who loves dogs might be.
The book isn’t considered part of the canon of modern Latin American literature and Steinbeck, whatever his critical reputation, goes in and out of fashion. So it’s no wonder that “Tortilla Flat” has never been remade with a real Latin cast. It’s too patronizing.
But I’d argue that the 1982 film of “Cannery Row,” which took its setting, sentimentalized poverty and tone from “Tortilla Flat,” didn’t just lean on this earlier “problematic” classic. It sanitized and sanctified its sentimentality and reminded us that we as a people, like the characters in the books and the author himself, have evolved.
Well, some of us, anyway. And that’s reason enough to look back on this classic as the amusing, romanticized and racially-tone deaf snap shot that it was and remains.
Rating: TV-PG
Cast: Spencer Tracy, John Garfield, Hedy Lamarr, John Qualen, Sheldon Leonard and Frank Morgan.
Credits: Directed by Victor Fleming, scripted by John Lee Mahin and Benjamin Glazer, based on the novel by John Steinbeck. An MGM release on Tubi, other streamers.
Running time: 1:45
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