The Grapes of Wrath

John Steinbeck's quasi-documentary study of Dust Bowl immigrants inspired this film. 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, and Ford won the Oscar for Best Director 1941.
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I just liked it, thats all. Id read the book it was a good story. The whole thing appealed to me being about simple people and the story was similar to the famine in Ireland, when they threw the people off the land and left them wandering on the roads to starve. That may have had something to do with it part of my Irish tradition.
</i>John Ford<i> </i>talking with Peter Bogdanovich, 1966