GRAPES OF WRATH (1940) A

A classic movie based of the Pulitzer Prize Winning Book by John Steinbeck about the dirt-poor migrants from the Dust Bowl, in Oklahoma, in the mid thirties. 

GRAPES OF WRATH was directed by Oscar-winning John Ford and starred a young Henry Fonda as ( mister every man) Tom Joad, who opens the movie by returning to his Oklahoma home after serving jail time for manslaughter. He sees that dust storms, crop failures, and new agricultural methods have financially decimated the once prosperous Oklahoma. His sharecropper family takes the harrowing trip to "the promised land" in California and finds ugly living conditions dominated by farmers who use these people ("Okies") as slaves to pick the crops.

Very socially relevant in its time, showing the the more prosperous people of United States how the agricultural industry really treats to poor and downtrodden. A key element of the movie is the universal truth that government must have a hand in some capitalist ventures where people can easily be abused if they are not organized into a union. It is still a present day message for many Americans and foreign workers overseas to fully understand. 

In the 1950's I saw a repeat of the same theme (in a different state , with different people) on a TV program called "See It Now ", produced on CBS by Edward R Murrow and Fred Friendly. Today much of the work in the fields are done by machines, but we are still living with the the problem of adequate living conditions for immigrant farmers in the United States. It is also sad that we buy cheap goods in the US burdened by the abused laborers in foreign countries.