From Peter Stowell, John Ford (Twayne, 1986)

“The Myth of American Agrarianism: The Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road”

The forces lined up against these families would use the land for speculation or industrial

capitalism (euphemized in both films as "scientific cultivation") so that the land would no

longer be used naturally nor worked individually. Its spiritual value would be lost. The

machine would enter the garden, destroying in its wake individualism and democracy. The

question that is never raised in any of these films , however, is, did not the very dream of

turning the wilderness into a garden represent a vision of progress that would inevitably

lead to the destruction of the garden? That is, since the simple plow is a machine, the machine

entered the garden the moment it broke open the land. Therefore, the belief in progress led

the agrarians into the hands of the mercantile capitalists. The situations presented by The

Grapes of Wrath and Tobacco Road were inevitable. (58)

But even more to the point is the fact that the film's retention of the Jeffersonian ideal places it to the left of the Hamiltonian capitalism that drove the Okies off their land. While the film is not so pointed as to the causes of the exploitation, it does not dodge the essential issues of dispossession: corporate ownership, means of ownership, uses of the land, and worker exploitation. While Ma’s speech ends the film, Tom's social activist speech precedes it. Two alternatives are posited: plodding survival for some, political action for others.

The film, like the novel, is double-edged. As a romance it suggests the optimism of quest and delivery, and as a film of American agrarianism it faces the reality of the loss of that dream. Though the novel's despair and determinism have been eliminated in the film , they have been replaced with nightmarish imagery of the wasteland. (59)

While critics of the film have derided its ending as a scene of simplistic, upbeat homilies, one could just as easily argue that these are the only articles of faith left to them. The American frontiers have been exhausted, big business controls what fertile lands remain, and the once-proud yeomen have been reduced to transient laborers and outlaws. These are the inevitable conclusions that the narrative structure and mise-en-scene of the entire film reach--and they cannot be reversed by two ringing speeches. Seen in this light, Ma s and Tom s words are plaintively illusory, spoken to stave off their own despair, rather than convince the viewers that all is well. (60)

It is during the second half of the film that the major differences between it and the novel appear. I would contend that the primary effect of these changes is to emphasize the positive values of the Joads' growing collectivism, while mourning the breakup of their family.

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There is no question, then, that the film's structure determines a more positive effect. But I would argue that this structure was not cynically employed simply to pander to the sentimental needs of the audience (which it may partially have been), but that its real value is to demonstrate the motivation behind the Joads' very real change from familial individualism to societal collectivism. And this shift is at the heart of the film's primary theme: the demise of agrarian individualism. (64-65)