Susan Shillinglaw is director of the Center for Steinbeck Studies at San Jose State University. Historical geographer Gray Brechin is project scholar for the Living New Deal Project. Harvey Smith is president of the National New Deal Preservation Association.

The great Nobel laureate John Steinbeck penned The Grapes of Wrath while the catastrophic effects of the Great Depression raged. For farming communities in the Dust Bowl, it was particularly desperate as droughts coincided with already harsh economic hardships, sending tenant farmers into dire migration. The equally great film director John Ford was quick to seize on Steinbeck's story, a blockbuster on the bookstands, as political factions argued over the novel's depiction of the farmers' plight. The Joads of the novel are here played by Henry Fonda as Tom, Jane Darwell as Ma Joad, and Russell Simpson as Pa. The harrowing Joad journey from Oklahoma to California is rendered with unvarnished verité by master cinematographer Gregg Toland. Faced with the sorry lot of their fellow migrants-the decrepit conditions of the ramshackle Hoovervilles, the contempt of those less unfortunate, their exploitation at the hands of industry-the Joads go through a radicalizing conversion best encapsulated in Tom Joad's declaration: “I'll be all around in the dark. I'll be everywhere. Wherever you can look, wherever there's a fight, so hungry people can eat, I'll be there.” A grand portrait of struggle in the realist style, Ford's fearless film suggests that if you press the grapes of wrath, you'll find that rarer extract, the milk of human kindness.