Longest gap between nominations

Henry Fonda received his first Best Actor nomination in 1941, for his performance in The Grapes of Wrath. Despite his legendary acting career, he was not nominated again until his Oscar win in 1982 for On Golden Pond. At 41 years, Fonda holds the dubious honor of having the record for longest gap between Oscar nominations. In addition to Fonda's nomination, The Grapes of Wrath won Oscars for Best Director (John Ford) and Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell), and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Adapted Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson).

Tom Joad (Fonda) is released from prison after 4 years to find that his sharecropping family has been pushed off of the land that they had been working for several years, victims of the Dust Bowl. He catches up with them just before they get pushed off of another plot of land, just before they leave Oklahoma for California and the promise of steady work and decent wages. The family faces a long, perilous journey, a dwindling supply of money, and death on their way across country. They arrive to find a lack of jobs, but a steady supply of injustice, prejudice, hostility, and more death.

The Joads' story is probably the definitive cinematic depiction of the Great Depression, produced at a time when Hollywood was still, for the most part, ignoring the event. The film was toned down quite a bit from the book, both for political reasons (the book's highly socialist viewpoint was not popular among the studio's financial backers) and for censorship code reasons (several of the events described in the book were deemed too shocking to be put in the film). Yet the film still manages to be powerful and intense, to not feel watered down. John Ford's direction, which earned him the second of his four Oscars, is masterful. His use of light and shadows, of sets and locations, does as much to tell the story as the performances that he gets from his cast.

Which, of course, is not to take anything away from the cast. Fonda delivers his performance with a quiet intensity throughout, making the audience accept him as a regular guy, much like themselves, even as he goes through events that few people could truly identify with, even after the first thing that the audience learns about him is that he was just released from prison for killing a man in a bar fight. Jane Darwell, winning the Oscar for her portrayal of Ma Joad, gives a mostly heartfelt performance, though she does tend to use an overly melodramatic tone of voice and expression in some of her key scenes. Not nominated, but worthy of recognition, is John Carradine in the role of Casy, a former preacher who becomes an outcast after losing his faith, but then finds redemption as he takes up the cause of the working poor.

Movie trivia question: This film was the first of only two films in Oscar history to have its Best Director win be shared by two directors.