Great film that does justice to the novel

Rating: 9/10 (6 April 2011)

When I say this I don't mean in the sense of how accurately the film follows Steinbeck's novel; the film starts to stray from the books story around halfway through the movie. What I mean is the film is great on it's own and ,unlike most film adaptations of books, this movie kept most of the others message intact. The key difference I found was that the book was much sadder. I know it's hard to believe seeing how depressing this movie was but their were many things the director chose not to show. The biggest difference was in the endings. The film leaves you with some since of optimism for these people, the novel does no such thing. The book leaves you with Rosasharn giving birth to a stillborn and offering her breast milk to a man dying of starvation. This obviously could have never been shown in theaters during the 1940's and I'm glad for it. I believe it would have been one powerful scene but the book was way to sad to begin with and the film was pretty depressing as well. Currently we could have handled a film like that just fine but back in the 1940's this was some amazingly heavy stuff. I just think keeping to Steinbeck's original ending would have instilled to much ill feelings in Americans in a time where we needed some optimism. So great film, don't watch it though if you can't handle a little despair though.