The Grapes of Wrath (1940) on Netflix
Tom Joad comes home to Oklahoma after a prison term and finds his family's farm emptied. With the former preacher Jim Casy, the Joads load a truck and head for California.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.1/10107,664 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
Trailer
Plot summary
Freed from prison, Tom Joad hitchhikes across Oklahoma toward the sharecropper farm where he grew up. On the road he falls in with Jim Casy, the preacher who once baptized him and who has since given up the calling, and the two walk to the Joad place together. The house stands empty. Neighbor Muley Graves, hiding out on the land, tells them the deedholders turned the farmers off and sent tractors through their homes. Tom finds his family gathered at his uncle's farm, packing a battered car rebuilt as a truck for the drive to California, where they have heard there is work. Casy asks to come along, and the Joads set out on the highway with everything they own.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Grapes of Wrath (1940)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director John Ford later admitted to interviewer George Bluestone, for his 1957 book Novels into Film, that he had never bothered to read John Steinbeck's novel before making the film based on it.
- The film was originally allowed to be shown in the Soviet Union in 1948 because of its depiction of the plight of people under capitalism, then withdrawn because audiences were noticing that even the poorest Americans in it could afford a car.
- Executive producer Darryl F. Zanuck worried the film would be branded pro-Communist because of the novel's left-wing politics, so he sent private investigators to Oklahoma to check whether conditions there were really as bad as Steinbeck described; when they confirmed it, he felt confident he could defend the film against political attacks.
SPOILER
Where Steinbeck's novel ends with the downfall and break-up of the Joad family, the film switches the order of sequences so the family ends up in a "good" camp provided by the government and things turn out relatively well; in the novel, Rose-of-Sharon gives birth to a stillborn baby.- The film had a record total of 301 pre-release dates, and it grossed $61,000 in its opening week at the Rivoli, which was the theater's biggest draw since Modern Times in 1936.
- A year-end poll of 546 critics nationwide, conducted by The Film Daily, ranked The Grapes of Wrath the second-best film of 1940, behind only Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca.
