Melvyn Bragg on The Grapes of Wrath

Watched ‘The Grapes of Wrath’ again recently, a wonderful film and wonderful book and then today I happened on an article by Melvyn Bragg in the Guardian about the book.

Seventy years after The Grapes of Wrath was published, its themes – corporate greed, joblessness – are back with a vengeance

The background (has the series been aired on BBC yet I wonder?)

Earlier this year, when asked to make a film about Steinbeck for the BBC, I went back with apprehension. The peaks of one’s adolescent reading can prove troughs in late middle age. Life moves on; not all books do. But 50 years later, The Grapes of Wrath seems as savage as ever, and richer for my greater awareness of what Steinbeck did with the Oklahoma dialect and with his characters. It is just as alive, with its fine anger against the banks: “The bank – the monster – has to have profit all the time. It can’t wait … It’ll die when the monster stops growing. It can’t stay in one place.”

We started filming with a small crew in Oklahoma, near the spot where the novel begins. This summer there was another drought, as there had been in the 1930s. They farm land better now, but even so, many farmers are going bust. The resonances with contemporary America were powerful: the working and middle classes have once again been holed by the big banks. Once again, the protests have started up, as Americans scan their continent for work. As in the 1930s, there is a powerful feeling that the promised land promises nothing, not even hope.