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 movie was extremely popular and critically well-received, and Ford won the Oscar for Best Director in 1941.