Grapes of Wrath movie poster

One Book Movie Night: The Grapes of Wrath

Monday, October 29, 2018 - 6:30pm to 8:30pm
  • Library Hall
See the 1940 film based on John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel — nominated for seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture.

The Grapes of Wrath was included in the first 25 films selected by the National Film Preservation Board to be preserved in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 1989, the first year selections were made. Winner of two Oscars (Best Director for John Ford and Best Supporting Actress for Jane Darwell), this American classic movie follows Tom Joad (Henry Fonda in an Oscarr-Nominated role) and his family as they escape the Depression-era Oklahoma dust bowls for the promised land of California. But the arduous trip and harsh living conditions offer little hope, and family unity proves as daunting a challenge as any other they face.

"If all this seems strange for Hollywood-all this fidelity to a book's spirit, this resoluteness of approach to a dangerous (and, in California, an especially dangerous) topic-still stranger has been the almost incredible rightness of the film's casting, the utter believability of some of Hollywood's most typical people in untypical roles. Henry Fonda's Tom Joad is precisely the hot-tempered, resolute, saturnine chap Mr. Steinbeck had in mind. Jane Darwell's Ma is exactly the family-head we pictured as we read the book. ... The Grapes of Wrath is just about as good as any picture has a right to be; if it were any better, we just wouldn't believe our eyes." — Frank Nugent, New York Times, January 25, 1940

"Absorbing, tense melodrama, starkly realistic, and loaded with social and political fireworks. ... Grapes is far removed from conventional film entertainment. It tackles one phase of the American social problem in a convincing manner. It possesses an adult viewpoint and its success may lead other producers to explore the rich field of contemporary life which films long have neglected and ignored." — John C. Flinn Sr., Variety, January 31, 1940

"It is an honest, eloquent, and challenging screen masterpiece. Great artistry has gone into its making and greater courage, for this screen tribute to the dispossessed not only has dramatized the large theme of Mr. Steinbeck's novel in enduring visual terms-it has demonstrated beyond any question that the cinema can take the raw stuff of contemporary living and mold it to a provocative photoplay pattern." — Howard Barnes, New York Herald Tribune, 1940

Run Time: 

129 min.

This is a featured event in the 2018 ONE BOOK STEAMBOAT community read of John Steinbeck's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Grapes of Wrath.