[Borges]

You do know that Daryl Zanuck and John Ford were conservatives right?

[Bernard Marx]

Nunnally Johnson’s script bristles with Leftist pro-government advocacy and hostility toward capitalism. Whether he was a propagandist for the left or simply playing to the Depression-era audience’s experience with hard times is moot. There was a lot of American sympathy toward Stalin’s “great experiment” then because the public was kept ignorant of its murderous horrors by a corrupt media. (Sound familiar?) People were hoping for some kind of miracle – Communism, perhaps? – to lift them out of bread lines and back to the prosperity of the Roaring Twenties.

While both Zanuck and Ford were considered politically conservative, Zanuck was definitely concerned that the film would be seen as pro-Communist. He sent investigators to the Dust Bowl who reported the plight of the Okies as valid. How he came to endorse Johnson’s pro-Marxist script is a task for a spiritualist, not me. Tom Joad’s big plea for “social justice” at the end would fit right into a MoveOn rally today. Roger Ebert speculated that America’s alliance with the USSR during WWII probably dulled any “Com-Symp” criticism of the film at the time. But times have changed.