Tortilla Flat is one of the most evil and insidious movies ever made. The screenplay was drafted from John Steinbeck’s acclaimed novel. The subversive film is an unabashed celebration of anti-bourgeois or “underclass values” and behaviors such as improvidence, hedonism, purposelessness, promiscuity, immediate self-gratification of needs or wants, and capricious spontaneity or irresponsibility. The central theme of the movie is a relentless attack or denigration of property, how property ownership corrupts and destroys one’s soul. Property ownership, stable employment in productive work, marriage, punctuality, thrift, foresight, deferred self-gratification of needs or wants, and self-discipline are the destructive middle class values under constant assault. This is one of Spenser Tracy’s greatest roles as Pilon, the seductive manipulator of everyone he meets for his own nefarious, greedy and selfish ends. He is one of cinema’s principal evil villains.
John Steinbeck was one of the most celebrated and acclaimed writers of the 20th Century. This Nobel Prize-winning author wrote 33 books, with one book coauthored alongside Edward Ricketts, including 16 novels, six non-fiction books, and two collections of short stories. He is widely known for the comic novels Tortilla Flat (1935) and Cannery Row (1945), the multi-generation epic East of Eden (1952), and the novellas The Red Pony (1933) and Of Mice and Men (1937). The Pulitzer Prize-winning The Grapes of Wrath (1939) is considered Steinbeck’s masterpiece and part of the American literary canon. In the first 75 years after it was published, it sold 14 million copies. Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA) fellow traveler Steinbeck joined the League of American Writers, a Communist front organization, in 1935. Steinbeck was mentored by radical writers Lincoln Steffens and his wife Ella Winter. Through Francis Whitaker, a member of the Communist Party USA’s John Reed Club for writers, Steinbeck met with strike organizers from the Cannery and Agricultural Workers’ Industrial Union. In 1939, he signed a letter with some other Leftist writers in support of the Soviet invasion of Finland and the Soviet-established puppet government.
5:14 pm on February 18, 2021
