s bittersweet, as they have been uprooted from their family home and are about to head west, in search of better days and distant promises.
It is the same search that the Earp brothers are pursuing at the beginning of My Darling Clementine and the search that Kirby Yorke in Rio Grande is prevented from pursuing by orders that keep him from crossing the river into Mexico to exact revenge of Apache raiders. Tom Joad, Wyatt Earp, and Kirby Yorke are all men whose family connections both tie them to their duty and challenge their ability to make their own way in the world. Joad must help the family make the trek to California, even if it puts him at risk for breaking his parole and tests his ability to make a life for himself. Earp is bound to the life of a cowboy by his loyalty to his brothers and becomes a lawman to exact the revenge that this loyalty demands of him. Yorke's family includes not only an estranged wife and a son he has not seen fo 15 years but also a troop of men, a general who is both commanding officer and long-time friend, and the Army that demanded he destroy his wife's plantation and thus endanger his marriage as result of the conflicting demands on his loyalty.
J. A. Place argues, "The basic unit of emotional value in Ford's oeuvre, which is threatened and must be affirmed through some process during the course of a film, is some variation of the family" (59). This may be clearest in Grapes of Wrath, in which the family unit seems to have been destroyed by poverty and society's indifference but is ultimately reaffirmed (if reconfigured) at the end, when it proves to be the one set of ties that endures.
Yet Ford also uses this trial by fire of the family unit as the driving force in the other two films, is in a less obvious way. Although his brothers are important to Earp, Ford spends little screen time delineating their characters or developing them as individual human beings. Instead, he streamlines ...