The Plow That Broke the Plains

 

Director Pare Lorentz

Composer Virgil Thompson

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

THE PLOW THAT BROKE THE PLAINS             C+                                                          USA  (25 mi)  1936 d:  Pare Lorentz

This is a record of land . . . of soil, rather than people -- a story of the Great Plains:

the 400,000,000 acres of wind-swept grass lands that spread up from the Texas panhandle to Canada . . .

A high, treeless continent, without rivers, without streams . . .

A country of high winds, and sun . . . and of little rain . . .

By 1880 we had cleared the Indian, and with him, the buffalo, from the Great Plains, and established the last frontier . . .

A half million square miles of natural range . . .

This is the picturization of what we did with it.

—Opening Prologue

One of only two government-sponsored films coming out of Roosevelt’s New Deal era, the other being THE RIVER (1938), made by the same director, both produced by the Resettlement Administration, which was established in 1935, merging into the Farm Security Administration in 1937, which captured the nation’s imagination by producing legendary photojournalists capturing the stark Depression-era conditions faced by rural Americans, like Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Arthur Rothstein, and Gordon Parks, among others, but the office eventually dissolved in 1946, becoming what is now known as the Farmer’s Home Administration.  The film explores farming practices on the Great Plains, suggesting a combination of ill-advised farming practices as well as severe drought led to the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, without even mentioning a great economic calamity.  What’s interesting is that the filmmaker had never made a film before, but worked as a freelance film critic, even co-authoring a book, Censored: the Private Life of the Movie in 1929, basically railing against established censorship practices in Hollywood, which made him persona non gratis within the industry itself, with Hollywood refusing access to stock footage owned by the studios.  But what jumpstarted his career was editing a book of news photos entitled The Roosevelt Year (1934) documenting in dramatic fashion the first year of FDR’s Presidency.  An ardent New Dealer, he was disgusted and disappointed that Hollywood’s way of dealing with the Great Depression was to largely ignore it while continuing to produce escapist fantasies.  Believing we were living in momentous times that “cried out to be filmed,” this led him to Washington where he became a film consultant within the Resettlement Administration, troubled from the outset, one of the more controversial New Deal programs, as critics felt Roosevelt’s reforms too closely resembled the collective socialization more commonly implemented by the Soviet Union under communism, where the film was designed to raise awareness of an environmental catastrophe.  During the making of the film, Lorentz fired all but one (the uncredited Paul Ivano) of his four cameramen over philosophical differences, Paul Strand, Leo Hurwitz, and Ralph Steiner, radical leftists out of New York City who felt communism was not a dirty word, all contending capitalism was at the root of the tragedy, finding the film overly scripted and not sufficiently visual, preparing their own shooting script, but Lorentz rejected it.  Scrounging for Hollywood stock footage afterwards, Lorentz was successful in getting material smuggled out of the studios, who were not happy with having to compete against government films, describing Lorentz as the president’s propagandist, eventually known as FDR’s Filmmaker.    

For a government film it is uniquely poetic, bordering on melancholic.  Lorentz described it as a “melodrama of nature” that “tells the story of the Plains, and it tells it with some emotional value—an emotion that springs out of the soil itself.”  The melodramatic narration is the bone of contention, spoken by Thomas Hardie Chalmers, a former opera singer in the days of Caruso who switched to theater following an unfortunate throat operation, associated as the newsreel voice of The March of Time, where the hyperbolic reading resembles Whitmanesque poetry, supposedly telling a uniquely American story, yet it’s more theatrical than informative, or even helpful, failing to mention the changing historical time periods, as it begins with Woodrow Wilson as President, presumably in the aftermath of the First World War, with cheap land offerings to veterans, promising vast quantities of open farmland, focusing on the challenges faced by wheat farmers and cattle ranchers living in the Great Plains, while making no reference whatsoever to a Great Depression, a term that was used prior to 1930.  So that aspect is confounding, as well as the racist Manifest Destiny implications in the opening Prologue about “we had cleared the Indian,” which sets the wrong tone, describing genocide as a noble duty and achievement.  Perhaps most baffling is the repeated claim to a land “without rivers, without streams” clearly outlining the geographical area in question, which includes some of America’s greatest rivers.  The Great Plains in question is a vast expanse of grasslands stretching from the Rocky Mountains to the Missouri River and from the Rio Grande to the timberland forests of Canada, which happens to include legendary rivers known as the Missouri, Platte, Yellowstone, Colorado, Rio Grande, Arkansas, Kansas, Pecos, and Red Rivers, among others, Encyclopedia of the Great Plains | RIVERS.  So the narration itself is highly questionable, as it’s not even accurate.  The theatrical manner in which it is spoken and interwoven into the film suggests other motives, as the filmmaker is clearly trying to persuade the hearts and minds of the viewers, conveying images of downtrodden families in a mass exodus leaving a bone dry land, “Blown out, baked out, and broke.  Nothing to stay for. Nothing to hope for.  Homeless, penniless and bewildered they joined the great army of the highway,” leaving it open to claims of New Deal propaganda.  Largely inspired by Soviet films of the 20’s and 30’s, like the documentaries of Dziga Vertov, both fall under similar critiques, but so what if it is?  Released just a year after Leni Riefenstahl’s controversial THE TRIUMPH OF THE WILL (1935), excerpts of which played alongside the official opening of the film in May 1936, sponsored by the Museum of Modern Art, the film will stand on its artistic merit, historical value, and the complexity of the imagery that is shown, added to the Library of Congress National Film Registry in 1999.  Adding to the film aesthetic, a symphonic composition was written for the film by American composer Virgil Thompson, adding a contextual layer of gravity that sounds distinctly American. 

What may remain lost to many viewers are the underlying human errors that are ultimately responsible for damaging the soil, with the film never explaining the effects of soil damage in the narration, instead viewers experience a photogenic assault of mechanized farm machinery supposedly cultivating the land, yet ripping apart the unanchored topsoil, which immediately turned to dust, becoming darkened clouds in the sky blown by the prevailing winds.  Like a Soviet montage, tanks of war are juxtaposed against the tractors, suggesting an armed military assault, depleting the soil of its needed nutrients.  Unfamiliar with dryland farming techniques, mechanized equipment cut too deeply into the soil, displacing the topsoil and deep-rooted grasslands that normally contained the moisture, even through extended dry periods.  Because there is such infrequent rain, perhaps only ten inches per year, made worse by extensive periods of draught, as long as eight years in some regions, there was insufficient moisture to hold the soil together, allowing it to evaporate into dust, creating the conditions that arose during the Dust Bowl era, with farmers and their families packing up their belongings and heading west, a migration documented by John Steinbeck in his 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath, also depicted in John Ford’s The Grapes of Wrath (1940).  Filmed years earlier, Lorentz provides the first documentation of the uncommonly grim plight of the farmer.  Times were good during a WWI wartime agricultural drive to produce food, with wartime slogans “If you can’t fight, farm:  food will win the war!” or “Plow to the fence for national defence,” converting millions of acres into farmland.  But international demand for grain plummeted after the war, especially for farmers that over-extended their operations.  The Agricultural Adjustment Act was the first major measure by the new administration to combat rural poverty, advocating crop restrictions, which had disastrous consequences.  In 1930, shortly after the stock market crash that created the Depression, as banks across the country closed in record numbers, 45% of all farmers were tenants and in some states up to 75% of tenants were sharecroppers, who were tenants who gave landlords a share of their crops in return for land, housing, and farm equipment. Landlords responded to the crop restriction measures by setting aside tenanted land and evicting 100,000 farm families, which began the steady flow of migrants westward to the cities and California, and with it the derogatory slur of being labeled “Okies.”  The belief at the time was that farmers over-cultivated the land through ignorance and human folly, turning 400 million acres into arid wasteland instead of fertile soil.  Part of the problem with the film is that it provides little context and presents no solutions, only accentuating the crisis, where the end feels like something of a thud. 

The Plow That Broke the Plains The entire film may be viewed on YouTube (25:26)

The Grapes of Wrath

 

THE GRAPES OF WRATH        B                 

USA  (129 mi)  1940  d:  John Ford 

Clarksville and Ozark and Van Buren and Fort Smith on 64, and there’s an end of Arkansas. And all the roads into Oklahoma City, 66 down from Tulsa, 270 up from McAlester. 81 from Wichita Falls south, from Enid north. Edmond, McLoud, Purcell. 66 out of Oklahoma City; El Reno and Clinton, going west on 66. Hydro, Elk City and Texola; and there’s an end to Oklahoma. 66 across the panhandle of Texas. Shamrock and McLean, Conway and Amarillo, the yellow. Wildorado and Vega and Boise, and there’s an end of Texas. Tucumcari and Santa Rosa and into the New Mexico mountains to Albuquerque, where the road comes down from Santa Fe. Then down the gorged Rio Grande to Los Lunas and west again on 66 to Gallup, and there’s the border of New Mexico.

And now the high mountains. Holbrook and Winslow and Flagstaff in the high mountains of Arizona. Then the great plateau rolling like a ground swell. Ashfork and Kingman and stone mountains again, where water must be hauled and sold. Then out of the broken sun-rotted mountains of Arizona to the Colorado, with green reeds on its banks, and that’s the end of Arizona. There’s California just over the river, and a pretty town to start it. Needles, on the river. But the river is a stranger in this place. Up from Needles and over a burned range, and there’s the desert. And 66 goes on over the terrible desert, where the distance shimmers and the black center mountains hang unbearably in the distance. At last there’s Barstow, and more desert until at last the mountains rise up again, the good mountains, and 66 winds through them. Then suddenly a pass, and below the beautiful valley, below orchards and vineyards and little houses, and in the distance a city. And, oh, my God, it’s over.

—John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath, 1939

The definitive work of the Great Depression, John Steinbeck’s 1939 novel is one of those rare books that was the best selling book of the year while also winning the Pulitzer Prize in 1940, which along with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, may well be the most thoroughly discussed and best analyzed books currently being taught in American classrooms.  It immediately captured the nation’s attention, becoming a lynchpin of cultural history and also one of the most beloved novels of American literature.  Steinbeck was a California writer who grew up in the Salinas Valley, where he wrote a series of seven articles about migrant worker communities for The San Francisco Chronicle, as tens of thousands of Americans were migrating to California during the Dust Bowl era of the mid 30’s, where Steinbeck spent time getting to know families living in the various migrant worker camps.  Infuriated by the amount of inhumane suffering he witnessed, he turned his disgust into a novel, which from the outset was controversial, showing unmitigated sympathy for the plight of the poor by exposing the cruel aspects of capitalism, which lead to a backlash against the author close to home, where the Associated Farmers of California denounced the book as a “pack of lies,” and labeled it “communist propaganda.”  Actually, the novel is to a large degree an outraged response to a government ideology of fear steeped in the paranoia of red scares, where immigrants and outsiders are deemed unpatriotic, where government propaganda demonizes and marginalizes unions out of greed and indifference.  This “realist” aspect of the novel is only hinted at in the movie, which was seen as an Oscar hopeful, so Hollywood could not present a supposedly true story about the government in this light.  It’s also interesting to note that at this stage in his career, director John Ford (who won the Academy Award for Best Director) was a leftist, describing himself in 1937 as “a definite Socialist Democrat, always left,” supporting liberal causes of the 30’s, such as the Hollywood Anti-Nazi league, and sent money to the anti-Franco, anti-fascist forces during the Spanish Civil War, while also becoming one of the founding members of the Screen Director’s Guild, a union that was extremely unpopular with studio executives.  Ford aimed to reproduce the Depression era style of photographers like Oklahoma-born Dorothea Lange, Walker Evans, and Margaret Bourke-White, and New Deal U.S. Resettlement Administration, government-produced documentaries like The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), becoming one of the first films selected to be in the National Film Registry in 1989. 

Twentieth Century Fox producer Daryl Zanuck, who purchased the rights to the book, actually hired a detective agency to investigate the migrant labor camps in California to see if the conditions were as bad as Steinbeck claimed in the book, and to no one’s surprise the agency reported back to Zanuck that the conditions were actually worse than what was portrayed in the novel, where Eleanor Roosevelt took it seriously enough that she called for congressional hearings on migrant labor camp conditions.  Zanuck then gave Ford free reign to make the film as brutally realistic as he could.  One assumes Ford took this project very seriously by his approach to the visual style, hiring Hollywood’s best cinematographer, Gregg Toland (who wasn’t even nominated for an Academy Award), who the following year filmed Orson Welles’ legendary masterwork CITIZEN KANE (1941), and incredibly the production was completed just 6 months after the book was originally published.  Set during the Great Depression, the story follows the Joads, a poor Oklahoma family of sharecroppers in the early 30’s who must move as the bank is kicking all the tenant farmers off their land, claiming dire circumstances brought on by Dust Bowl drought and economic hardship.  Along with literally thousands of other Okies who are in the exact same predicament, they migrate West to California, where they hear jobs are plentiful.  While Steinbeck alternates chapters describing the land, the people and their hardships, painting a picture touching on all the things the country was going through with the story of the Joad family, focusing upon their epic journey West, where part of the beauty of the book is a fascination with all the places they traveled through and certainly the wonderfully descriptive language:

The concrete highway was edged with a mat of tangled, broken, dry grass, and the grass heads were heavy with oat beards to catch on a dog’s coat, and foxtails to tangle in a horse’s fetlocks, and clover burrs to fasten in sheep’s wool.

The first part of the film version accurately follows the book, with the dialogue almost intact from the page, though instead of joining up with other families, the Joads remain on their own and arrive in California more quickly, while the second half veers into different territory, creating a more uplifting, visionary ending, as the downbeat and miserablist original ending is something that recollection suggests has never been shown on a movie screen.  A few striking observations from the outset, for such a realist drama with documentary style elements, one is surprised to see so much of the film take place in the restricted confines of a studio movie set, and minimally showcase the vast endless landscapes of the great outdoors (which surface later in Ford’s Westerns), shots that might reflect the majestic character of America, and the extraordinary beauty of the book’s language.  Instead, much of the early shots take place at night, where faces are lit like flittering ghosts when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda), just out of prison on parole after killing a man in a barroom brawl, discovers his family has left their homestead, and instead finds Muley (John Qualan) and former preacher Casy (John Carradine) on the premises, where they’re seen talking by candlelight.  Despite the impressive cinematography, what stands out is the artificiality rendered in these early shots, where there’s little hint of realism, while the repeated orchestral refrains of “The Red River Valley” only grow monotonous.  Even more surprising is the exaggerated and wildly uneven sense of caricature from all the actors involved with the exception of Fonda as Tom Joad, who is one of the great characters of literature, and one of the great portrayals in American film as well, as this is arguably Fonda’s greatest performance, especially since Tom is a flawed individual with such a checkered past.  His Midwest, folksy inflection literally breathes authenticity into these lines of such a plain speaking man, making the iconic character come to life, becoming synonymous with fair play and social justice, as he always defends the principles of small town morality, where rewards are based upon honesty and hard work, where no man is better than any other.  “Maybe it’s like Casy says.  A fella ain’t got a soul of his own, just a little piece of a big soul.  The one big soul that belongs to everybody.”     

As they cross the country among the legions of others, this sense of ordinary human decency is on display in a local restaurant when the owner and waitress give Pa Joad a break on the prices for a loaf of bread and a few pieces of candy, where their kindness represents the generous spirit of those who willingly help others in a time of need.  By the time they get to California, however, the ultimate conflict of the film is the violation of those simple American principles, where the Joad family symbolizes the casualties of the Depression, where the openhearted kindness of the Joads runs up against heartless authorities of the bank, but also includes the police and their paid deputies who represent the farm interests, where neighborhood trust is replaced by suspicion and blunt force.  Our first look at one of the destitute migrant camps still leaves a picture in our heads long afterwards, and it’s one of the best shots in the film, showing hordes of people living in squalor, passing by crowds of people that literally give them cold, haunting stares, vividly expressing the fear of not knowing where your next meal is coming from, and reveals the extent of the cruel labor exploitation, as there is an oversupply of workers who are forced to work for next to nothing, and anyone who tries to organize or warn workers of the potential hazards of quick wage cuts has to answer to rogue deputies with guns and nightsticks.  At one point, they’re led in secret, under police escort, into a fenced-in and locked living compound at a peach orchard, where they’re not told the circumstances but immediately ordered to work, forced to buy food supplies at the inflated prices of the company store, where without realizing it, they’re actually strikebreakers filling in at half the wages of the striking workers.  Things only go from bad to worse, where Tom’s friend Casy is murdered right before his eyes, where he wants to strike back, but its clear California doesn’t want this influx of migrant workers, where law enforcement seems determined to drive these unwanted “outsiders” into slave wages and servitude.  Pitted against these brutally deteriorating conditions, Tom Joad becomes a symbol, an identifiable everyman character who must rise up and stand against this enveloping madness, personifying a desperate hope for people who struggle, becoming a clarion call for economic justice, embodying the spirit for social justice that will live on for generations to come, as if that is our patriotic duty.  In the film, however, it’s Ma Joad (Jane Darwell, winner of Best Supporting Actress) who has the last word, voicing an uplifting, anthem-like vision of a new day ahead, led by a “We the people” reference to our nation’s founding principles.