A drama set among migrant farmworkers in California in the Thirties Depression.

One would think that John Steinbeck had said it all in The Grapes of Wrath, so powerfully and definitively filmed by John Ford.

That apart, this TV film, directed by John Korty, does a decent job: good-looking Mark Harmon (sexy Dr Cauldwell in St Elsewhere) is believable as Ertie, the former rodeo star who is forced to do whatever farm work he can find in order to maintain his wife Bessie (an over-melodramatic Lee Purcell) and five children.

It is a story of evil landowners paying starvation wages to dispossessed migrant workers, and the viewer will of course be rooting for the workers attempting to organise themselves into a union.

It's all fine, tub-thumping stuff, with the added interest of the story of Ertie's son Jake (Morgan Weisser) on his rite of passage from youth to man.

Production values are sound, with fine photography and a haunting score.