It’s easy to demonize those seeking better wages and working conditions when living in times of plenty. We see it every day as people working fast food, as a retail cashier, or even the person pushing in shopping carts out of the parking lot bemoan that wages haven’t kept up with inflation. The snarky and ignorant thing a lot of people say is that those jobs aren’t meant to be a career, just quick and easy work for high schoolers or college kids to earn their beer money while pursuing education to go after a “real” job. The reality is, though, that these kinds of jobs are becoming more in demand and the “real” jobs, the kinds that require higher education, don’t often pay that much more. And that’s during a time when we are supposedly living in a world of plenty.
Imagine a time when the recession was so bad that it was actually a depression. Those who still have great-grandparents may be able to go and get direct information about such a time; it wasn’t that long ago, after all. We hear about how no one wants to work because the pay doesn’t equal the effort, but there was a time, about a hundred years ago, when people were willing to work themselves nearly to death for pennies, not even enough to feed themselves, just because there were no other options.
It’s hard to imagine the sheer magnitude of the Great Depression, but it was real and it could happen again. People lost their homes, places their families had inhabited for generations, farmland they had cultivated, to greedy landowners and had to leave it all behind and travel west to California on the promise of work picking fruit for a pittance. And people did it because they were desperate and starving.
John Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath, came out just as the Great Depression was coming to an end. The year was 1939, and it explored that decade in US history through the eyes of a single family from Oklahoma put in just such a situation by that economic downturn. It paints a very dark picture of the government, the situation in our country that was still ravaging it even as Steinbeck put pen to paper, and the views that anyone seeking better pay was to be likened to a Red, aka a communist. The law wanted to knock people down for seeking a better life, and Steinbeck hit back with his dark and downtrodden story.
When John Ford took the reins the following year to adapt it to film, some alterations had to take place. Some were there to appease the Hays Code, some were there to soften some of the more harsh criticisms Steinbeck was throwing out there. This didn’t soften the message, though, and The Grapes of Wrath was met with near universal acclaim. In 1989, when the Library of Congress began selecting films to be preserved for their National Film Registry for being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”, The Grapes of Wrath was among the first 25 titles chosen.
The film follows the Joad family. Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) has just been paroled and hitchhikes back to his family’s farm. But when he arrives, he finds the place abandoned. The local farmers were forced from their farms by the land deedholders, who knocked down their houses with tractors. Tom is soon reunited with the family hiding out at his uncle’s house. They are planning on migrating west to California to find work picking fruit and cotton, viewing the state as the land of promise based solely on a flier advertising work. Everything, and everyone, including Jim Casy (John Carradine), an old former preacher and family friend, is packed up into a dilapidated old truck, and they head west.
What they find is discouraging: more people than jobs in California. And what work there is is hard and pays very little, even less depending on how many people show up to do it. Not everyone in the family survives the trip to California; both grandparents fall before they arrive at their destination. Eventually, the Joads find themselves at a clean facility called the Farmworkers’ Weedpatch Camp, a clean facility run by the Department of Agriculture, complete with indoor toilets and showers, something the youngest kids in the family have never seen. This place seems like a paradise compared to what else they have seen in California so far.
But some people are looking to disrupt this ideal environment, arranging for men to enter and start a riot, giving the law an excuse to storm in and arrest the leaders of the camp. This plan is thwarted, but news arrives that the police are on the lookout for Tom Joad for an incident earlier that led to a guard at one of the picking farms getting killed. Tom chooses to leave the family before he can be caught but vows to keep working for the rights of the workers. The rest of the family, broken apart by life, death, and everything else in between, will continue on, just as all of their kind will continue to live on.
This was another film that I distinctly remember watching at school. I had teachers who felt that films like this would give us a better idea of the things we were being taught in history class. While I remember certain class members being bored to tears over this black-and-white film from forty-five years in the past, at that time, I found the movie to be somewhat fascinating, if a bit hard to fully grasp. Fast forward to the present day, and I am revisiting it for the first time since then. My memory of certain moments is still crystal clear, whereas the more difficult parts apparently flew over my head as a sixth-grader. This is not a film designed for kids of my age then to fully grasp, no matter how much my teachers may have thought otherwise.
There are a lot of complicated messages here. People like to make the comparison between the Farmworkers’ Camp and Communism, bringing up the Red scare whenever something doesn’t quite fall into the category of capitalism. The same thing is still happening with people being attacked and called socialist as if that is an insult. They will do anything to tear down a working system if it doesn’t fall perfectly into the capitalist ideal. No system is without faults, but people fear the other and will often attack it even when it is doing them no harm. That becomes even more so when there is perceived harm, such as workers who will no longer tolerate bad pay and poor working conditions. Unionizing came out of this, which many at the time found threatening to their way of doing business.
Steinbeck was bringing to life these issues, and John Ford took the reins and ran with it. He mostly follows the novel during the first half but made some heavy changes in the second half to give the ending a sense of hope the book didn’t have. It was the right call for this film. There is only so much dour and downtrodden imagery movie audiences can deal with without being shown a light at the end of the tunnel, especially for people who were just emerging from this timeline themselves. World War II was just starting to feel like an inevitability for American audiences, and with that would come some economic reprieve, but the scars of the Depression were still healing, and John Ford’s film ends with the promise that we would get through this hardship and trials, just like we always do. There is power in large numbers, and the world was just getting ready to learn that all over again.
Academy Award Nominations:
Outstanding Production: Darryl F. Zanuck and Nunnally Johnson
Best Director: John Ford (won)
Best Actor: Henry Fonda
Best Supporting Actress: Jane Darwell (won)
Best Screenplay: Nunnally Johnson
Best Film Editing: Robert L. Simpson
Best Sound Recording: Edmund H. Hansen
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Release Date: January 24, 1940
Running Time: 129 Minutes
Not Rated
Starring: Henry Fonda, Jane Darwell, John Carradine, Shirley Mills, John Qualen, and Eddie Quillan
Directed by: John Ford
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