Running Header: WHY THE FILM AND BOOK OF 1

Why the film and book of The Grapes of Wrath do not give us the same experience?
Yuwei Quan

University of California, Berkeley

College Writing R1A

Why the film and book of The Grapes of Wrath do not give us the same experience

We all have been students and at one time required to read classic works of literature. There
are a few of us that really read the book page by page, and enjoy the work of the respected and
widely celebrated author, but many of us just skim through a summary online at a website like
SparkNotes. Then, many years later, when a film version of the book comes out, the book we left
unread becomes a shameful reminder of our lack of diligence and the film may seem like a
redemption. In other words, we think that book and film will give us the same story and sensation.
But that is not always the case. The film might thoroughly overturn the message being told by the
book, even though it seemed true to the original. It was “The Grapes of Wrath” that taught me this
surprising lesson.

The Grapes of Wrath was John Steinbeck’s best-known piece of fiction, published in 1939.
An immediate national best-seller, the book tells the story of the Joad’s, a farming family in
Oklahoma, who is forced to leave their lands under the crisis of the Great Depression and dust
bowl. They move to the west, to California driven by handbills saying that a lot of fruit pickers are
wanted in the orchards there. The story of the Joad’s is the story of thousands of families who lost
their lands and migrated west for farming work to survive at the time of the dust bowl. The local
Californians called them Okies. Due to the discrimination from local residents, their life were
miserable and awfully inhuman, living at the edge of towns called “Hooverville”. Their homes
were self-made tents from tarpaulin and their stoves were dirty tin pans on a pile of dry wood.
Starving kids died of malnutrition and heart failure. Men were seeking jobs everywhere;
sometimes work came in the harvesting seasons but with payment so low it could barely feed his
whole family after long working hours. It was a desperate life, and Steinbeck was desperate to tell
people about it.

Steinbeck wanted to speak against the injustice and inhuman treatment of the migrated
families. He lived in the California central valley himself as a boy. He used to work side by side
with migrants workers (Nixon, n.d.). This made him feel that the migrants are not outsiders but
just common people like him. When the anti-migrant law came out in 1937 preventing migrants
from entering the state, Steinbeck became angry and was urged to take some actions (Nixon, n.d.).
He wanted to help the public see the unknown life of the migrants and arouse sympathy for them.

The result was The Grapes of Wrath, which was burned and banned from some schools
and libraries. The America Associated Farmers blamed Steinbeck for proposing collective
communism in agriculture (Nixon, n.d.). However, it also won the Pulitzer Prize and was discussed
around the nation on the radio and in newspapers. The best-selling book drew immediate attentions
from movie studios. In the end, the executive producer of Twentieth Century-Fox studio Darryl F.
Zanuck purchased the film rights for $70,000 after a bidding war with major film companies (R1A
U3 L1, 2018). This was courageous but also challenging for a conservative movie studio to work
on a communist subject in 1940s. Zanuck appointed John Ford, an Oscar winner and also a
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dedicated republican, as the director. Ford’s movies often dealt with rugged individuals surviving
in harsh landscapes (R1A U3 L1, 2018). He was attracted by the book, as he put it “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 (Nixon,
n.d.).” This is the same kind of people and life Ford wanted to present to the audiences. However,
Ford’s focus was only the people, the Joad family but not the social political message behind The
Grapes of Wrath. He had frankly admitted that "I was sympathetic to people like the Joad’s, and
contributed a lot of money to them, but I was not interested in Grapes as a social study (Nixon,
n.d.)." Essentially, John Steinbeck wrote this book to show the struggle and rebellion of the migrant
families from the harsh exploit of social injustice and capitalism under the spirit of unity. In
contrast, John Ford has made the story solely on praising how the steely Joad family can survive
under harsh outside pressure by depending on themselves and eventually creates a individualistic
hero, Tom Joad, who is going to help his family and all the migrant families.

The difference between the book and film are mainly because of the different political
views of Steinbeck and Ford. Steinbeck was an active lifelong democrat and also one of the first
Americans to visit Soviet Russia. He was one of the big supporters of the New Deal, in which the
US government adopted some elements of socialism. Steinbeck’s book is a fascinating work of
suppressed American people during the Great Depression and dust bowl under the shadow theme
of communism. Unlike Steinbeck, Ford was a devout republican and was awarded the Presidential
Medal of Freedom by Richard Nixon. His portrait of society in his The Grapes of Wrath reflects
strongly republicans’ viewpoints. Moreover, the film is essentially more commercial then book. It
seeks the viewers’ positive feedback and to attract a broad audience. Thus, the film version of The
Grapes of Wrath replaced the depressing ending of the book; Rose of Sharon feeding a dying
starving man with milk of her breast with a more hopeful and positive ending of Ma’s speech of
“We are the people”. John Ford explained, “There had to be some ray of hope, something that
would keep the people who saw it from going out and getting so drunk in utter despondency that
they couldn't tell other people that it was a good picture to see. Steinbeck agreed on the necessity
for a more hopeful ending.” Their divergent political views and commercial essence of film made
the book and film end up with different portraits of capitalist, police and theme of unity.

The film ignored most of what the book had to say about capitalists. One example is the
car dealers. In the book, the car dealers took advantage of poor people who were just driven away
from their land with little money and whose only hope was to migrate to the west. The dealers
mislead uninformed people to sign contracts and replaced working parts with broken ones before
delivery. Customers were not well informed when making decisions and there was no law to
regulate the market. Steinbeck’s message was clear that it is immoral and unfair for businessman
to retain market power due to customer’s desperation. In contrast, in the film, the part of car dealers
is ignored. It all goes with one sentence that the family sold their belongs and picked cotton for
two hundred dollars and bought the truck for seventy five dollars. Another example is the
landowners. In the book, landowners dumped oranges into river, poured milk into ditches, and let
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their cherries rot in the fields just because they could not make profit from them. The people who
owned the land also owned the can factories, waiting for cheap fruit to make canned fruit.
Landowners who could not make profit lost their land to the bank and became another starving
man. People who had capital power completely controlled the market and this was indeed a market
failure. Just as Steinbeck exclaimed in the book, “there was crime on the land.” People were
abandoning the precious fruit of land and nature and starving people to death just for money. These
examples imply Steinbeck’s criticism of an unregulated market and uncontrolled capital power
and his strong belief that government should ensure a fair market for both customers and suppliers.
In contrast, in the film, landowners are on the side of the migrant people. When the police are
planning to instigate a fight at a dance and disrupt the self-regulated government camp of the
migrants, it was the landowner who leaks the information to the migrant workers on his farm and
helps them avoid the crisis. This is actually the only one good thing Steinbeck wrote about a
landowner. This scene shows the complete opposite of what Steinbeck wanted to say about
capitalists. For his film, Ford could not depict capitalists like landowners or businesspeople as evil
agents or a causing factors of the Depression when the film itself was funded by a strong capital
force, Chase National Bank. What’s more, Ford’s republican idea that government should not
influence the market too much prevented him from showing the market failure to audiences. In
this way, Steinbeck’s reflections on the depression that lack of market regulation are fatal and
awfully painful to the general public, especially the poor, also faded away in the film.

The book and film have similar portrayals of the police but lead us to different judgment
on them. What the police have done in the book is mostly left unchanged in the movie. They both
depict the police as evil and vicious. For example, both the book and film show that the police
support the contract man in Hooverville to unfairly suppress the hourly wages of migrant workers
by arresting people who resisted or disrupted the contract man and even shoot people randomly in
the camp, hurting innocent people. Additionally, in the peach ranch, the police help the landowners
to pacify the strike over unfair wages and even killed Casy for his leadership in the strike. Most
importantly, in the book, Steinbeck pointed out explicitly that the police was driven by profit to
help contract men and landowners because they got paid for each migrant they put into jail. But,
Ford didn’t mention this in the film. By clearly presenting the motivation for the immoral behavior
of the police, Steinbeck was suggesting that law enforcement should never be privatized. It must
serve the whole population but not the minority in power. In contrast, lacking the explanation that
the police are driven by money, the film was inducing us to think that the sadness and bitterness
of migrants’ life were caused by a handful of corrupt police. By doing so, Ford was hiding the true
scale of the injustice and redirecting our attention to the surface; a few unreasonably bad police.

The theme of unity of all people in the book has been completely ignored by the film. In
Steinbeck’s writing, the message that suppressed people should stay together and thus be
stronger appeared throughout the book. For example, Casy was always talking about a big soul:
“When they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of
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harnessed to the whole shebang . . . that’s holy (The Grapes of Wrath/55),” while in the film the
speech is mostly deleted. And, during the journey to California, the Joad’s always offered
generosity and are helped by other families. To illustrate, grandpa died in the Wilson’s tent; Ma
feeds kids in Hooverville despite having barely having any food; Pa and Uncle John built a ditch
with their boxcar neighbors. In Ford’s production, only the scene of Ma feeding starving kids in
Hooverville is kept, but grandpa and grandma die on the side of Route 66, not in the Wilson’s
tent and boxcar neighbors are unmentioned. The book had a clear message: When faced with
hard times, people should stay together and believe that they are one thing. The oppressed should
seek self-governance and the chance to write their own rules. Just like the government camp in
Steinbeck’s book, where there was no police and people regulating the government camp were
elected from and by the people who lived in the camp. However, the message is largely
overturned in the film as audiences see how the Joad’s work hard independently to support
themselves, picking cotton and fruit, without any words about a “big soul” and other families.

Finally, the ending was a huge divergence from the original book. The book ends with a
shocking scene: Rose of Sharon is in desperation after giving birth to a stillborn and the families
are moving to a barn to escape the floods. In the barn, they find a hungry dying man with his son,
and Rose of Sharon eventually decides to feed him with milk from her breast. From this
astonishing ending, Steinbeck was implying that in the most desperate time when no one can
help the suffering people, the only way they can survive is to stay together and be one thing.
Finally, by hunger and anger, they have no fear and they will stand up for themselves. On the
contrary, the film ends with Mom’s speech of “Rich fellas come up an' they die… But we keep
a-comin'. We're the people that live. Can't nobody wipe us out. Can't nobody lick us. We'll go on
forever, Pa. We're the people (Johnson, n.d.).” The speech signals that by working hard and
staying tough, people can always overcome hardship. The theme of union disappeared
completely. The enlightenment of union and revolution was covered up by Tom, the
individualistic hero who bravely solved problems for himself and others. Once again, it reflected
Ford’s republican political view that self-empowerment of the individual is the ultimate solution
to social problems.

It may seem that watching The Grapes of Wrath film, with all its awards, is a good
substitute for reading the book. But the film overturned and weakened many political messages
the book conveyed to readers. Through Steinbeck’s vivid and pictorial depiction, we feel the urge
for the need of regulation of capitalists, social security and a more responsive and sympathetic
government. The film was more conservative and trying to avoid these voices and didn’t want to
touch upon the theme of union at all. I learned as a reader and film viewer that a film based on a
book can be manipulated to redirect our perspectives and reflections. Thus, they don’t provide the
same experience. One should think critically through the author’s intentions and backgrounds to
have an independent understanding over the content presented in the book and film. After all, they
seem to be the same stories but are told from different political voices.
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Reference

Johnson, N. (n.d.). The Grapes of Wrath Screenplay. The daily script. Retrieved from

http://www.dailyscript.com/scripts/grapes_of_wrath.html

Nixon, R. (n.d.). The Big Idea Behind The Grapes of Wrath. The TCM. Retrieved from

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/220764%7C0/The-Big-Idea-The-Grapes-of-

Wrath.html

Nixon, R. (n.d.). Behind The Camera of The Grapes of Wrath. The TCM. Retrieved from

http://www.tcm.com/this-month/article/220765%7C0/Behind-the-Camera-The-Grapes-of-

Wrath.%20html

R1A U3 L1 Class note. (2018, December). Retrieved from

https://bcourses.berkeley.edu/courses/1475286/files/folder/Class%20Notes/Unit%203?previ

ew=73864806

Steinbeck, J. (1939). The Grapes of Wrath. The Penguin Book. Retrieved from

https://www.amazon.com/Grapes-Wrath-John-

Steinbeck/dp/0143039431/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1544463045&sr=1-

1&keywords=the+grapes+of+wrath+by+john+steinbeck