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The Grapes of Wrath


" John Ford's "The Grapes of Wrath" is a left-wing parable, directed by a right-wing American director, about how a sharecropper's son, a barroom brawler, is converted into a union organizer. The message is boldly displayed, but told with characters of such sympathy and images of such beauty that audiences leave the theater feeling more pity than anger or resolve. It's a message movie, but not a recruiting poster."

"The movie was based on John Steinbeck's novel, arguably the most effective social document of the 1930s, and it was directed by a filmmaker [John Ford] who had done more than any other to document the Westward movement of American settlement."

"The novel and movie do last, I think, because they are founded in real experience and feeling. My parents were scarred by the Depression, it was a remembered devastation I sensed in their very tones of voice, and "The Grapes of Wrath" shows half a nation with the economic rug pulled out from under it. The story, which seems to be about the resiliency and courage of "the people," is built on a foundation of fear: Fear of losing jobs, land, self-respect. To those who had felt that fear, who had gone hungry or been homeless, it would never become dated. And its sense of injustice, I believe, is still relevant. The banks and land agents of the 1930s have been replaced by financial pyramids so huge and so chummy with the government that Enron, for example, had to tractor itself off its own land." -------- Roger Ebert

Selected for the Library of Congress National Film Registry of American Film.

DVD

  • Available Audio Tracks: English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo), English (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono), Spanish (Dolby Digital 2.0 Mono)
  • Available subtitles: English, Spanish
  • Commentary by scholars Joseph McBride and Susan Shillinglaw
  • U.K. prologue
  • "Darryl F. Zanuck: 20th Century Filmmaker" as seen on A&E's Biography
  • "Roosevelt Lauds Motion Pictures at Academy Fete" featurette
  • Movietone news: three drought reports from 1934
  • Outtakes
  • Restoration comparison
  • Still gallery


Curator's Comments:
Read Roger Ebert's essay on this DVD Classic.

Director: John Ford
Black & White
129 minutes
Released: 1940
Rated: NR

Country: U.S.A.
Language: English
Genre: Drama

 

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