The Grapes of Wrath (1940)

Official trailer

The Grapes of Wrath is the John Ford-directed 20th Century Fox adaptation of John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel about the Great Depression. (See John Steinbeck Day)

Ford directed. Nunnally Johnson wrote the screenplay. Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, a paroled convict returning home to Oklahoma to find his family’s farm foreclosed and the family preparing to leave for California. Jane Darwell plays Ma Joad, the family’s emotional center. John Carradine plays Casy, the former preacher who joins the family’s journey west. Charley Grapewin plays Grandpa Joad. Russell Simpson plays Pa Joad.

Dorris Bowdon plays Rosasharn. The plot follows the Joad family’s migration from Oklahoma to California along Route 66, their experience in California’s labor camps, Tom’s growing radicalization, and his eventual departure to organize agricultural workers. The Grapes of Wrath leaves me angry and moved in equal measure, and it does both without ever raising its voice. Ford and Fonda trust the Joads’ plain dignity to carry the whole picture, and I can’t think of an American film about the Depression I’d put ahead of it. The 10 was an easy call.

The film made approximately seven and a half million dollars in initial 1940 release on a seven-hundred-fifty-thousand-dollar budget.

The commercial performance was strong. The film received seven Academy Award nominations and won two (Best Director for Ford and Best Supporting Actress for Jane Darwell). The Grapes of Wrath is consistently cited among the great American films of the 1940s and among the most lasting American films about the Great Depression.

The film’s Depression-era specificity, its location cinematography along Route 66, and Henry Fonda’s performance as Tom Joad have all entered the permanent vocabulary of American cinema.

The Migration

The film’s structural backbone is the physical migration from Oklahoma to California.

Gregg Toland’s cinematography (the same Toland who shot Citizen Kane the following year) captures the actual landscape of Route 66 in 1939. The dust bowl conditions in Oklahoma, the truck stops along the highway, the Colorado River crossing, and the eventual arrival in California’s Central Valley are all filmed with documentary-level specificity. The migration sequences are some of the most-imitated location work in studio-era American cinema.

The migration also is the film’s argument for the scale of what the Depression was.

The Joads are one of hundreds of thousands. The film’s roadside-stop sequences, the labor-camp arrivals, and the systematic exploitation of California’s migrant workers all establish that the Joads’ experience is structural instead of individual. The film argues that what’s happening to the Joads is happening to an entire region’s worth of Americans. The structural specificity gives the film political weight no purely personal drama could carry.

The Route 66 footage affects me more than any studio set could. I believe every truck stop and every dusty face, and that realism is what makes the anger in the film feel like fact.

The Fonda Performance

Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad with a dramatic performance among the most committed of his career. The character is a paroled convict whose specific physical and psychological reality the film establishes through Fonda’s controlled performance. Tom doesn’t display the suffering. Tom absorbs it. The audience reads Tom’s interior life through small physical choices: the deliberate movements, the careful eye contact, the deliberate avoidance of family members who might ask questions about his prison time.

The performance’s defining moment is Tom’s closing speech to Ma about where he’ll be after he leaves. The “wherever there’s a fight” monologue is among the most-quoted speeches in American political cinema. Fonda delivers the speech with sustained restraint. The character isn’t declaiming but explaining what he’s decided after careful thought. The performance refuses the actor-friendly speechifying the script could have invited. Political content in fiction can be delivered through performances that resist becoming political theater.

That goodbye to Ma is the scene that justifies the 10 for me. Fonda says it quietly, like a man telling his mother something he’s already settled, and it stirs me far more than any shouted speech could.

The Ma Joad

Jane Darwell’s Ma Joad is the film’s emotional heart and the source of its Oscar-winning supporting performance. The character is the family’s practical and moral center. She decides what the family packs for the migration. She decides who eats when food is scarce. She decides whether the family can absorb new members or accept new losses. The performance plays Ma as continuously calibrating against scarcity. The audience reads her authority through the weight of her decisions instead of through any voice-raising.

The character’s closing scene is the film’s argument for collective endurance.

“We’re the people that live. They can’t wipe us out. They can’t lick us. We’ll go on forever, Pa. We’re the people.” Ma delivers the speech in the back of the truck as the family drives away from yet another labor camp. The performance is plain. Darwell speaks the words without elevation. The plainness is the source of the power. Ma isn’t making a speech but stating what she’s decided is true.

The audience reads this as testimony instead of as oration. Darwell breaks my heart in that truck. She reads those lines with no more ceremony than a grocery list, and I think that flatness is the bravest acting choice in the film. She deserved that Oscar.

Does The Grapes of Wrath still hold up?

10/10. Fonda’s Tom and Darwell’s Ma are as good as American screen acting got in that era, Toland’s Route 66 footage makes every hardship feel documented, and the family’s slow fragmentation hurts more with each stop along the road. I can’t find a flaw I’d bother mentioning. Watch it, then read Steinbeck’s novel, because the two make each other stronger.

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