The Spectre of Tom Joad

Pop Matters discusses the importance of John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath.

From the piece...

Conditions were ripe for the emergence of The Grapes of Wrath from the recently founded studio Twentieth-Century Fox. Producer Darryl Zanuck had always been considered sympathetic to progressive film content. While at Warner Bros. he championed the production of I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang (1933), which chronicles the real-life exploits of Robert Burns who had been mercilessly imprisoned and punished by the Georgia penal system. In 1933 he left Warners to found his own studio, Twentieth-Century Films, which purchased the bankrupt Fox Studios in 1935 to finally become Twentieth-Century Fox.

Similarly, John Ford had proven his progressive credentials with his pro-I.R.A., expressionist-inflected 1935 film The Informer. It won Best Actor, Best Director, Best Screenplay, and Best Music during the 1936 Oscars. Ford’s frequent screenwriter, Dudley Nichols, held well-known Left sympathies and consistently pushed Ford’s filmmaking into even more populist directions as their 1939 collaboration Stagecoach reveals, where bankers are exposed as scoundrels, and prostitutes and outlaws represent the true legacy of American democracy and frontier fortitude.

The Grapes of Wrath remains a foundational example of Popular Front culture. The Popular Front refers to a change in Communist Party ideology in 1935. Instead of opposing other Left groups like socialists, democrats, and anarchists, as had been previously done, the party initiated a coalition among them in order to collectively combat the rising threat of international fascism. Many cultural workers joined in the three primary efforts initiated by the Popular Front: anti-fascism, pro-union, and racial equality. Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, James Cagney, John Howard Lawson, Billie Holiday, Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, Jean Renoir, John Steinbeck, John Ford, and Dudley Nichols, to only name a few, all allied themselves with a Popular Front outlook. Because of the diverse Left political philosophies influencing Popular Front culture, the products tend to emphasize a populist outlook with opaque gestures towards systemic analysis of capitalism and oppression.