Our Vines Have Tender Grapes **** (1945, Edward G Robinson, Margaret O’Brien, James Craig, Frances Gifford, Agnes Moorehead) – Classic Movie Review 8782

Emanuel Goldenberg was born in Bucharest, Romania, arrived in the United States at the age of 10, and  moved with his family into New York’s Lower East Side, took up acting and changed his name to Edward G Robinson. The G was for Goldenberg, apparently.

Here he forsakes his famous gangster roles for the moment to play (enjoyably) Martinius Jacobson, a Norwegian farmer in Wisconsin, in director Roy Rowland’s sweetly pleasing, character-driven 1945 MGM family film Our Vines Have Tender Grapes, also showcasing the talents of popular child performers Margaret O’Brien and Jackie ‘Butch’ Jenkins.

O’Brien plays Robinson’s seven-year-old daughter Selma, Jenkins is O’Brien’s five-year-old cousin Arnold Hanson and Agnes Moorehead her mother Bruna. The plot, based on George Victor Martin’s book, in the screenplay as arranged here by the highly talented but soon-to-be-blacklisted scenarist Dalton Trumbo, is a just a rambling series of anecdotes: there is a barn fire, a flood, a romance, a fight over roller-skates and a circus comes to town. But, overall, the anecdotes plus the performances add up to a tasty movie.

Robinson sandwiched this in between two Fritz Lang thrillers, The Woman in the Window and Scarlet Street.

While Trumbo was blacklisted during the McCarthy witchhunt hysteria of the early Fifties, Robinson testified as a ‘friendly witness’ for the House Un-American Activities Committee was ‘absolved’ of allegations of Communist affiliation. The story is told in Trumbo (2015).

Also in the cast are Morris Carnovsky, Frances Gifford, Sara Haden, Greta Granstedt, Dorothy Morris, Elizabeth Russell, Louis Jean Heydt, Charles Middleton, Francis Pierlot, John Berkes, Arthur Hohl, John Merton, George Lloyd, Rhoda Williams and Abigail Adams.

The title comes from The Bible, The Song of Solomon, Chapter 2-15: ‘Take us the foxes, the little foxes, that spoil the vines: for our vines have tender grapes.’

Martinius Jacobson tells the children in the barn that a cow has two stomachs, but they actually have four.

© Derek Winnert 2019 Classic Movie Review 8782

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