John Ford, The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

John Steinbeck's quasi-documentary study of Dust Bowl immigrants inspired John Ford's film, The Grapes of Wrath. Like Steinbeck's book, the film follows the Joads, an Okie family trying to get to California in an overloaded jalopy filled with crying children, beaten-down people, and dying grandparents. It is a sympathetic look at the fate of the farmers who fled the Dust Bowl for brighter futures in California, but encountered there instead the same class system and prejudices that had impoverished them back home.

When Ford released The Grapes of Wrath, some people found it depressing and pretentious; why, critics asked, would people struggling through the Great Depression want to go and watch a movie about people like themselves taking it in the teeth? Despite this criticism, The Grapes of Wrath was an extremely popular and critically well-received movie; Ford won the Oscar for Best Director, although Henry Fonda lost out as Best Actor to James Stewart in The Philadelphia Story. And many in the audience found it inspiring, especially the speeches delivered by Fonda and Jane Darwell, as Ma Joad, at the end of the film. Ford, and not Steinbeck, wrote those inspiring speeches; Steinbeck's vision was infinitely darker than Ford's. The Grapes of Wrath made such an indelible impact on the minds of Americans that just a few years later, when Preston Sturges made a funny and moving film which responded to and parodied The Grapes of Wrath, called Sullivan's Travels (1941), everyone recognized the connection.


Questions to Think About:

1) What caused the suffering of the Dust Bowl emigrants, according to Ford? How should that suffering be alleviated and who bears responsibility for alleviating it?

2) How do the people along the road and in California treat the Okies? Why do they treat them like that?

3) When the Joads pull up to the government camp, the man at the gate seems just like Saint Peter, and he looks just like President Franklin Roosevelt. What does this scene, and other depictions of the Roosevelt administration, indicate about popular views of FDR?

4) Why would the audience gather hope from Grapes of Wrath?

5) The Grapes of Wrath takes place in the West, deals with a movement of people within the West, and addresses issues (dwindling resources, environmental degradation, water scarcity, labor strife, and boom-and-bust, federally-dependent economies) of vital importance to Westerners. Yet, most critics don't call it a "Western." In fact, most critics point out the irony that John Ford--famous for directing such classic "Westerns" as Stagecoach, My Darling Clementine, Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, and The Searchers--won four Oscars (for The Informer, How Green Was My Valley, The Quiet Man, and The Grapes of Wrath), but "none for a Western." Is The Grapes of Wrath a "Western"? If you have to redefine "Western" movies to include The Grapes of Wrath, what does that tell you about the relationship of Westerns to Western history?

Further resources for studying Grapes of Wrath and its times:

Byron Preiss's brief biography of Grapes of Wrath author, John Steinbeck.

Tim Dirks's Grapes of Wrath page.

Ed Stephan's page about Steinbeck's California novels, and his eccentric Grapes of Wrath page.

Route 66 travelogue has sepia-toned images of the Okie exodus.

Woody Guthrie's lyrics to Tom Joad.

The University of California at Berkeley's Migrant Labor Camp Photographs from the Harry Everett Drobish Papers, 1935-1936.

Randy Connor's Photo Essay documenting the Joads's journeys.

The Internet Movie Database's Grapes of Wrath information page.

Alon Yaari--a student of geography at the University of Southern California--maintains a John Steinbeck Information Page.

Further readings:

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Andrew Bergman, We're in the Money: Depression America and Its Films (1971)
Tag Gallagher, John Ford: The Man and His Films (1986)
Joseph Millichap, Steinbeck and Film (1983)
Vivian C. Sobchack, "The Grapes of Wrath (1940): Thematic Emphasis Through Visual Style," in Peter C. Rollins, ed., Hollywood as Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context (1983)
Donald Worster, Dust Bowl: The Southern Plains in the 1930s (1979)
James Gregory, American Exodus: The Dust Bowl Migration and Okie Culture in California (1989)
John Tuska, The American West in Film: Critical Approaches to the Western (1985)

Prepared by Professor Catherine Lavender for courses in The Department of History, The College of Staten Island of The City University of New York. Send email to lavender@postbox.csi.cuny.edu.
Last modified: Saturday 12 September 1998.