10 Movie Messages Completely Undermined By Their Ending
4. The Great Depression Was An Eternal Struggle - The Grapes Of Wrath
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John Ford's The Grapes of Wrath certainly doesn't paint the Great Depression as a picnic, but the Joad family's desperate struggle to survive does feel a little sanitised by the film's ending, which deviates from the bleaker finale of John Steinbeck's legendary novel.
The movie concludes with the Joads ending up at a USDA Weedpatch Camp, where they're fed, clothed, and have access to indoor toilets and showers, all while Tom (Henry Fonda) vows to keep fighting for workers' rights.
It's certainly not a squeaky clean happy ending, but paints a picture of hope for the Joads ending up in a much better situation than when we first met them.
But the novel offers no such respite, ending on a more fittingly bleak note where Rosasharn's baby is stillborn, the family suffers through a horrific flood, and Rosasharn breastfeeds a starving man in order to save his life.
While you can reason that the Hays Code of the time prevented the movie from depicting things like dead babies and breastfeeding, its more optimistic ending doesn't feel quite as true a depiction of the Great Depression's grim realities as a result.