If you are looking for a good movie about the Dust Bowl, I would recommend "Under Western Stars" (1938), a musical starring Roy Rogers.
Thanks for the Dust Bowl-related book and film suggestions.
If you haven’t read Egan’s book (amazon.com link below), it does a
good job of detailing the unrealistic farming practices that made
the topsoil a victim of the drought and winds of the Dust Bowl era.
And he has some simply harrowing interviews and diaries of
the tough folk that tried to ride out the downturn.
Many of my family members (father and mother sides) lived in the area
around Tonkawa and Blackwell during the Dust Bowl / Great Depression time.
My mother’s family had a hard go of it while my father’s family had
what was (relatively speaking) nice existence working on their paid-off
farm and some precious income from a small property in the Three Sands
Oil field area about 15 miles away.
My late father said he knew his family was lucky because they never
lacked for food. But he didn’t like chicken because it provided
so much of his daily protein intake. And that was a LUXURY during
those lean times.
The Worst Hard Time: The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl
by Timothy Egan
http://www.amazon.com/Worst-Hard-Time-Survived-American/dp/0618773479/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1221797177&sr=1-1