Film Review: The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath
Shasta Gragg

Action, loss, heart-break, tragedy, and hope are common themes in films throughout history.  When you combine all of these powerful emotions into one film, you can be sure that it will be noticed.  Audiences and critics alike took notice when John Ford released The Grapes of Wrath in 1940.  The book the film is based on was at the height of popularity and controversy, setting the stage for the film to capture attention across the world.  Ford didn't disappoint.  The Grapes of Wrath quickly became one of the most critically acclaimed films in cinematic history.

Based on the Pulitzer Prize winning book by John Steinbeck, the film version of The Grapes of Wrath tells the heart-breaking odyssey of the Joad family.  After being forced away from their sharecrop land that they'd farmed for over 50 years, they head west to California to look for work and a better life.  Their migration is filled with uncertainty and loss.  At one point they stop to fill up with gas, and the gas station attendant says to his co-worker, “Them Okies got no sense and no feeling.  They ain't human.  Human being wouldn't live the way they do.  Human being couldn't stand to be so miserable.”  Unfortunately, this is a common sentiment towards the Okies and other farmers displaced by the giant dust bowl of the plains.

Once they reach their destination, the promise land of California's fertile fruit fields, the Joad family soon realize that it may not be the land of plenty.  They see absolute poverty and hunger in the working camps.  They find hard-working families being harassed by authorities.  In short, they find that the American Dream is a sham.  That there is no promise that working hard will enable anyone to live a nice life.

The Grapes of Wrath is a political testament to the deplorable way the migrant workers in California were received and treated.  It was a humanitarian crisis within our country that was mostly ignored.  This film makes some very liberal points, unobtrusively encouraging audiences to question whether or not they enjoy good wages and working conditions and to think of striking and questioning their employers if they aren't being treated fairly.  The film also makes references to the “Reds” and the brutal way they're stepped upon by authorities and farm owners.  If you look closely throughout the film, you'll find that it showcases how unfair capitalism is to the common man.  It's never explicitly spoken but the audience would have no problem finding this underneath the plight of the Joad family.

The main spoken theme of this film is the importance of family.  In the beginning of the film, Tom Joad has just been released from the penitentiary.  When he finds his family, he is welcomed heartily and fully.  You can tell from the beginning scenes that the Joad family loves and cares for one another.  They stick together to go to California, and once there, they all work together.  Several times throughout the film, Ma Joad talks of the importance of keeping the family together, of getting the family through.  It paints a suggestion that if a family works and fights together, then nothing can break them apart.

The Grapes of Wrath is more than the story of the Joad family.  It is the story of an entire country struggling to survive and pull itself out of the Great Depression.  Facing nearly insurmountable odds  with unemployment, severe poverty, and hunger, many people didn't have it in them to keep fighting.  The Joad family did.  All in all, it's a film about hope.  A hope that if a family keeps going, keeps fighting, and keeps working hard, that they will make it through.