So this has been next up on our AFI list for a bit. I asked my wife if she wanted to watch it, and I feel like her reply basically encapsulates my feelings about this movie in prospect, too: “I’m never going to want to watch it.” Like, seriously, a grim and gritty movie about the Dust Bowl and Okies and all that just seriously does not sound fun. And it wasn’t. But it was interesting.

The biggest thing for me isn’t really the story or the characters — Tom Joad in the movie (I’ve never read the book) is kinda just vaguely there and doesn’t have much personality of his own, and the rest of the characters are mostly drawn broadly where they aren’t ciphers. (The “Ma” character is something of an exception, with maybe the most nuanced portrayal and real personality.) And it’s not really about the style of the thing, though director John Ford and cinematographer Gregg Toland (who went on to shoot Citizen Kane) are two masters both doing great work here.

What’s interesting is the kind of historical documentary sense of the thing. Like, this story about the Depression isn’t something out of a dusty history book for the filmmakers: The book was written in 1939, the movie released in 1940. The people who made this, and the ones who watched it, knew the Great Depression, they’d lived through it. In some respects, they were still living in it: Unemployment in 1940 was right around 15%. There is one month in our lives that’s ever come close to that number, April 2020, when pandemic shutdowns drove unemployment to 14.7%. It’s hard to imagine that number not just as a reality rather than a one-off, but as a reality at a time when things were getting better after the worst of the grinding, decade-long Great Depression.

In this sense, what this reminds me of isn’t any other American movie, it’s Italian neorealism like Bicycle Thieves, as a portrait of a society in crisis and desperate poverty. But — maybe because it is, after all, American — it’s also a road movie of a sort, with Ford filming shots all along Route 66 (the main artery of westward migration at the time, the interstate highway system not yet in existence).

But beyond that documentary nature, this is also a very angry movie. There’s so much of a sense that Old Hollywood movies are square-jawed pieces of earnest Americana even when they’re liberal — you know, that kind of Jimmy Stewart-esque sort of thing — that it’s shocking here to see the open antipathy toward big corporations and sympathy for communism. The sense that the system was failing everyone comes through loudly here.

This is, in the end, a movie that definitely belongs on this kind of list. Not only was it a big deal in its day, but it captures its day in a way that surprised me. I don’t think you could understand the twentieth century without understanding this movie, even — especially — if it’s not any fun to watch.