Movie Review

John Steinbeck once wrote to his editors, perhaps hyperbolically, that his novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939) had five layers in it. This documentary, which focuses on the book, Steinbeck, and depression-era migrants, successfully explores several of those layers. At one level, The Grapes of Wrath was a social document that outraged management groups such as the Associated Farmers of California, while it suggested, at least at one point, that the Okies' wrath could spill over into revolution. But the author's son, Thom Steinbeck, convincingly argues that his father was not really interested in fomenting or leading a class war, disappointing those who thought the author was down in the trenches with them. In fact, Thom says, the book "cost [his father] so much personally," as he lost his anonymity and became the target of criticism, that Steinbeck was never the same after its publication. Nonetheless, as Charles Shindo points out in his book Dust Bowl Migrants in the American Imagination (1997), raising the social consciousness of the liberal middle class, if not the awareness of the Okies, was one purpose of the work.

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