What 1940 film directed by John Ford features Henry Fonda as Tom Joad?

The 1940 John Ford film featuring Henry Fonda as Tom Joad is The Grapes of Wrath.

Adapted from John Steinbeck’s 1939 Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, the film follows the Joad family after mechanization and economic collapse drive them from their Oklahoma farm during the Great Depression. Tom Joad returns from prison and joins his family on a difficult journey along Route 66 toward California, where they hope to find work. Fonda’s performance made Tom a defining screen portrait of Depression-era hardship and social conscience.

The screenplay was written by Nunnally Johnson, with Darryl F. Zanuck serving as executive producer. Jane Darwell plays Ma Joad, and John Carradine portrays the former preacher Jim Casy. The movie preserves the novel’s concern with migrant labor, poverty, exploitation, and collective action, but it softens or omits some of Steinbeck’s harsher material and gives the ending a more hopeful tone.

Cinematographer Gregg Toland used stark black-and-white imagery to emphasize dust, crowded camps, and the family’s long displacement. The film was among the first 25 works selected for the National Film Registry in 1989, recognized as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.