The Grapes of Wrath in every form is very hard to take. It shows how the poor and dispossessed lived and loved during the Great Depression in America. Its real message is how the big corporations had stopped treating people as humans and started treating them as numbers.
In case you haven’t read it or seen the movie here’s a potted storyline. Young Tom Joad and his family are thrown off his family’s land in Oklahoma, they’ve been farming there for 50 years and generations have been born and died there. They come across a handbill asking for pickers in California so they pack up their truck with all their possessions, and family members, with the intention of driving along Route 66 (a new and very long and important road across America) to California where they expected to work very hard and make lots of money. The journey happened, family members died or left along the way and they finally got to California to find thousands of other families all trying to do the same thing. The big corporations were paying stupidly low wages for picking stupidly large amounts of fruit or cotton, families did their best to survive but many didn’t. I know prices were much cheaper in those days but they were being paid 5c for a bucket of oranges and that was dropped to 2.5c as there were so many workers. Some people were trying to organise strikes and unions, people died as a result. Tom Joad killed one of the men trying to break up the strikers and ended up going on the run.
The movie is a fairly condensed version of the book. If you read the Wikipedia page on it you can see the movie deviated from the book somewhat in the last half. I can’t agree or disagree as it’s been a long time since I last read it, I watched the movie this week during a break from the computer. That’s probably due to movies and books having different methods of delivery, I’m sure I’ve discussed this in a previous article. I felt the movie was true to the book in that it showed us how the families coped or not and it also showed how the big corporations viewed the people doing the hack work.
The book followed the Joad’s on their journey and as it was in written form John Steinbeck was able to give much more detail. We see details about Tom’s young sister, Rose of Sharon, and her new husband as well as her pregnancy and the still birth of her child. We see many more details of the picking jobs and how the prices dropped from 10c to 5c to 2.5c. I could go on and on as the details are there about the camps and how degrading they were and how little food they had. The movie has to cover all of this detail in a much shorter time so we only see some of it with the inference that these kinds of things happened in so many different places. The kindness displayed is generally by the person representing themselves or their families as opposed to the person representing a large corporation. The family take in others, they feed other children in various camps and others are generous to them with generosity being given to them in their turn. They personify the Pay-It-Forward campaign.
If you haven’t read the book or seen the movie be prepared for heartache and tears. I’d actually be comparing it with many large companies today to see how they have changed, if at all.