The Joads consist of careworn matriarch Ma (Jane Darwell); her soft-spoken husband Pa (Russell Simpson); Pa's elderly parents Grandpa (Charley Grapewin) and Grandma (Zeffie Tilbury); Ma and Pa's grown sons Tom (Henry Fonda), Al (O.Z. Whitehead) and Noah (Frank Sully); Ma and Pa's pregnant daughter Rosasharn (Dorris Bowdon), married to Connie (Eddie Quillan); and Ma and Pa's youngest children, Winfield (Darryl Hickman) and Ruthie (Shirley Mills). Also on board for the trek West is disillusioned preacher Casy (John Carradine).
Tom is the lead character. He is a young man recently paroled for manslaughter, so we know he has the potential for provoked violence. Somehow, the Joad clan makes it California mostly intact. They spend time in an itinerant Okie camp where everyone is dirt poor and bullied by policemen. Later, the Joads find subsistence work picking peaches, but Casy and Tom are confronted by the menacing work camp guards, and the Joads are obligated to leave the camp.
Prospects improve for the Joads after they arrive at a New Deal camp with a higher quality of life, run by the sympathetic Grant Mitchell. Policemen unsuccessfully attempt to arrest the camp workers. Tom, wanted by the law for violence committed in self defense, decides to leave the Joad family to prevent their arrest as accomplices.
The Grapes of Wrath was directed by one of the all-time greats, John Ford. The producer was 20th Century Fox mogul Darryl F. Zanuck, a talented details-oriented man who contributed to the casting, screenplay, direction, and editing.
The film was based on the then-recent John Steinbeck novel, which won the 1940 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The book is more controversial than the movie, since the latter followed the Production Code. The book has been repeatedly banned by conservative rural communities. In 2004, Steinbeck's legacy was challenged when it became clear that in "The Grapes of Wrath" he had borrowed important elements from "Whose Names are Unknown", a then-unpublished novel by Sanora Babb.
How others will see it. The film was as sensational a success as the book. It won Oscars for Best Director (Ford) and Best Supporting Actress (Darwell). It was Oscar-nominated for Best Picture, Best Actor (Fonda), Best Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson), and Best Editing (Robert L. Simpson).
The Grapes of Wrath was added to the prestigious National Film Registry in its very first year, 1989, alongside such famed classics as Casablanca, Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, and Singin' in the Rain.
Today at imdb.com, The Grapes of Wrath has a very high user rating of 8.1 oout of 10, which rises to 8.3 among viewers over age 45. It has 91K user votes, a lofty total for a black and white movie more than eight decades old.
There are, predictably, user reviews that lambast the film as left-wing propaganda, or claim that it is an insufficient adaptation of the beloved Steinbeck novel. But the reviews are dominated by praise from those who sympathize with the plight and poverty of the Joad family, and their determination to overcome it. The film's messages are so powerful that the actors and director are infrequently mentioned.
How I felt about it. We find it hard to believe that Ma is the mother of Ruthie, given their age difference. It also seems that the heavily burdened Joad jalopy makes it farther on a gallon of gas than is conceivably possible. Grandma and Grandpa die all too quickly, as if they are strictly allegorical characters representing the loss of Okie land. Connie leaves his wife to increase audience sympathy for her. The police and camp guards are stereotyped as bullies if not murderous brutes.
But the message of injustice is triumphant over petty criticism. One can see why Henry Fonda was so driven to play Tom Joad that he signed a seven-year contract with 20th Century Fox to land the role. One can debate whether socialism is the solution for Great Depression poverty, but it sure beats starvation if that is the only alternative.