What better time to review the hard-won lessons of the Great Depression then when we’re in the Great Recession? You can argue that the Great Recession is over, but some of us are still feeling economic hard times, particularly in California. John Steinbeck wrote “The Grapes of Wrath” in 1939, winning a National Book Award and a Pulitzer Prize. John Ford directed the 1940 movie that starred Henry Fonda.

The movie begins with Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) hitching a ride back to his family’s farm in Oklahoma. On his way, he meets the preacher who baptized him, Jim Casy (John Carradine). But Casy has given up his faith although his spirit was tainted by his lust. The two meet another acquaintance (John Qualen) who describes how farmers are being forced off of the land.

This is a very different Oklahoma than portrayed in the musical “Oklahoma!” Gone is the hope and the corn that grew as high as an elephants eye has been replaced by dust, dust and more dust. The ground has been depleted of nutrients. Wasteful water management and just plain bad luck with weather has brought a drought.

The tenant farmers can’t pay the rent and are being driven off of lands they have farmed for generations. Tom arrives to a deserted “home” and finds his family at his Uncle John’s place. In a 1926 Hudson sedan that had been crudely adapted, an extended family of 12 leave for California based on the handbills promising jobs.

The Joads take the fabled Route 66 but by California two of their members have died and were buried at the side of the road. In California, the family finds greed and corruption. With not enough jobs to go around, the migrant workers are exploited, bullied and beaten. Ma Joad finds herself weighing generosity against selfish survival. Originally willing to share with everyone, she finds herself with barely enough for her own family and turning starving children away. Ma Joad keeps the family together while Tom Joad, turning fugitive, must help his family by leaving and by agitating for change.

If you’re writing an essay for a school assignment, be warned that this movie doesn’t faithfully follow the sequence of events and is more positive than the novel. The novel’s original ending was too controversial for the uptight 1940s. This version doesn’t involve breast feeding. Moreover, Ford focused on the family unit and how the family breaks down for several different reasons, including when Tom Joad discovers a cause–the family of mankind. We never see the backbreaking work that they get paid pennies for and the different pains and problems of different type of harvesting entails.

At the 1941 Academy Awards, Jane Darwell won a Best Supporting Actress Award for her role as Ma Joad. Ford won for direction.

“The Grapes of Wrath” is currently available on-demand via Netflix.