#23 ‘The Grapes of Wrath’

Noble Suffering and the Masculine Myth of Moral Poverty

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is Hollywood’s stab at Steinbeck, a black-and-white dust storm of noble hardship and Depression-era despair, shot through with aching Americana and enough stoic jaw-clenching to crack a molar. It’s a beautifully filmed, tightly acted ode to endurance—but like all Depression dramas filtered through the male gaze, it insists that moral clarity belongs to the working man, while the women just keep the coffee hot and the grief quiet.

Henry Fonda plays Tom Joad, recently paroled and spiritually simmering, who joins his family on a migration from the desolate dustbowl of Oklahoma to the alleged promise of California. What unfolds is a slow burn of exploitation, injustice, and that peculiar American faith in dignity-through-suffering. You see, when working-class men are beaten down by capitalism, they don’t organize—they look off into the horizon and monologue.

Let’s be clear: this film wants to say something radical. It flirts with class consciousness, labor solidarity, and the cruelty of the system. But in true 1940s Hollywood fashion, it reins it all back in with platitudes and patriarchal piety. The Joads don’t rise up. They endure. And the film, instead of interrogating the system that crushes them, romanticizes their resilience like it’s a folk song with dirt under its fingernails.

The women, of course, are sainted specters of sacrifice. Ma Joad, played by Jane Darwell in an Oscar-winning performance, is the emotional core of the film—but she’s less a character than a symbol. Earth mother. Moral rock. Tireless matriarch. She cries quietly when no one’s looking and delivers wisdom in between serving beans. Her strength is in not complaining, not resisting, not desiring. Feminine virtue here is silence, patience, and spiritual endurance while the men get to rage, wander, and become metaphors.

John Ford’s direction is elegiac, full of deep shadows and faces lined with poetic grit. Every shot screams “this is IMPORTANT”—which it is, to a degree. The film helped shape cinematic language around poverty and labor, and its heart is in the right place. But its politics are softened, its fury aestheticized, and its women sanctified into irrelevance.

And don’t forget the ending—Steinbeck’s bleak, radical conclusion scrubbed clean for an audience that just wanted to feel uplifted through other people’s despair. Instead of a starving infant and a mother’s radical mercy, we get hope, resilience, and the open road. Because apparently nothing is more American than rewriting suffering into moral victory while ignoring who actually gets to write the ending.

3 out of 5 dusty horizons
(One for Fonda’s righteous pout. One for Ford’s eye. One for Jane Darwell, holding up the world while everyone else finds themselves. The rest was buried in the sand along with the last shreds of working-class rage.)