Grapes of Wrath

Watching the opening scenes of Ford's GoW, it is hard not to know what is going on. Black and white, man at a crossroads, alone. Within a few frames we learn this is an angry guy, suspicious and quick to anger. Perfectly crafted, the angry guy meets JC ( now who could that represent), any way we get right away that this nice guy is going to be somehow instrumental in the transformation of Tom, unless Quentin Tarentino steps in to finish the film.
My point is that maybe it would be great if John Ford directed life. Maybe there would be some unified view, a mediated time line that has a perfectly orchestrated arc and we would have big moments inhabited fullt by regular folks, where though times are tough, moms rule, the weak die, those who do not adapt will get crushed... that's better than scripted fear stuff orchestrated by an ex-cheerleader and his friends.

I have gotten off the subject straight into a political rant.

Back to GoW.

Ford is the kind of director that can frame the large situation (often in a door way) and then flesh out the threads of various characters in the smaller moments, light passing across a face, the cry of a dog on the prairie, etc. He is lost and gets bogged down in sentimental scripts but rises large in the hard hitting ones. He is up to extracting every bit that he can get past the censors, who though on the lookout for communist or labor sympathisers, seemed not to have understood the power of Steinbeck's material. Through the power of film, important social issues were free ranging in a larger cultural domain, catalyst to another kind of understanding of the relationship of wealth, privilege, labor and property.
The politics of these two men, is a whole notha thing, as humanists first, I think their politics ran across lines of political to an America inhabited by real people trying to make sense of what was happening around them.
Both address ideas of home... where it is, who makes it, what is home, when does a space become home?
Both seem to deal with ideas around the outsider and whether he can make a deal with life as he finds it and call a space home, whether it is burning, or a truck on the road...
So, I wonder what kind of film would Ford make today? Would he be annoyed that we love his film and agree in principle, but still have homelessness in our country and support actions that create massive diaspora in other countries?