OUR DAILY BREAD B-
USA (80 mi) 1934
d: King Vidor
“Inspired by Headlines of Today” reads the opening title
screen, which gives one pause, begging the question, what headlines? This is a Depression era film that plays to
the pervading sense of hopelessness and desperation that was spreading across a
panicked nation, where people’s lives were at an economic dead end, seemingly
with no future. While shown in a somewhat
realistic manner, with a few exceptions, this film plays out more as social
fantasy, a call to arms offering a utopian dream as a hopeful outlook for the
otherwise grim prospects of the future, where the idea of pitching in and
working together is reflective of the New Deal era
ideal of getting people back to work, needing solutions to help recover from
the economic collapse of the banks and major financial institutions, when the
unemployment rate of the nation increased to 25%, where one-third of all
employed persons were downgraded to working part-time on much smaller paychecks,
and almost 50% of the nation's human work-power was going unused. The plain truth of the matter is that people
were desperate for jobs, any jobs, as at this point in history there was no
national safety net in place, no insurance on lost savings accounts from failed
banks, no unemployment insurance, no Social Security, no help for the poor, as legions
of people lost their homes with conditions worsening year by year. This film was made just after Franklin D. Roosevelt began serving his first
term as U.S. President, March 4, 1933, where his first 100 days ushered in the New Deal
legislation. Influenced both by D.W.
Griffith's realism and Sergei Eisenstein's montage aesthetic, King Vidor, from
Galveston, Texas, shot local events for national newsreel companies before
moving to Hollywood, becoming a company clerk for Universal, writing scripts
under the pseudonym Charles K. Wallis, as employees weren’t allowed to submit
original work to the studio, eventually founding “Vidor Village,” a small
studio that imitated similar projects by Chaplin, Sennett, Griffith, Ince, and
others, until he was eventually hired by Louis B. Mayer at what would eventually
become MGM, where he worked for the next 20 years. Vidor built a reputation for stylistic
experimentation and uncompromising concern for social issues, where the
struggle for individualism against the forces of nature or destiny became
prominent themes.
Written by the director and his wife Elizabeth Hill, Vidor
had trouble getting backers for this film, as the major studios refused to
finance it, making this an independent production that Vidor financed himself,
eventually catching the eye and financial support of Charlie Chaplin at United
Artists, a company ironically run as a cooperative by leading figures in early
Hollywood seeking an outlet to distribute their own works. Showing a certain amount of political naiveté,
Vidor’s intent was to show how ordinary men alone can become extraordinary by
working together in this socialist utopian agriculture melodrama that originated
from a Reader’s Digest article, with added
dialogue by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. The
film was made as a sequel to his earlier Silent film THE CROWD (1928), which presents
the reactions of an everyman to the harsh and impersonal conditions of
surviving in the city, where John and Mary Sims come to realize they are mere
faces in an endless sea of humanity destined to live anonymous lives. Following the same characters played by
different actors, it is now the Great Depression, where John (Tom Keene) and
Mary, Karen Morley, perhaps best remembered for her role as Poppy, the negligee
wearing gun moll in Howard Hawks’ SCARFACE (1932), are a couple out of
work and about to be thrown out of their apartment for nonpayment of rent. With no prospects on the horizon, Mary’s
wealthy uncle decides to offer them an abandoned farm that is about to be foreclosed
by the government before he can make any use out of it. Though John is a city boy with no farming
experience, they head for the country and move to the farm, hoping they can
live off the land until the economy improves.
Finding it harder than they realized, John welcomes a traveling couple
fixing a flat in front of their home who happen to be immigrant farmers from
Minnesota that just lost their farm, offering Chris (John Qualen), a happy go
lucky Swede, a piece of land and a place to stay for free in exchange for his
farming expertise. In no time, John
realizes how much could be accomplished with the addition of just a single man,
who has to chuckle at John’s inexperience throwing away weeds that turn out to
be carrots, imagining how much more work could be done if he added ten men,
posting roadside advertising that eventually draws a crowd. Unable to say no to anyone, he welcomes one
and all, skilled and unskilled, so long as they put in a hard day’s work,
creating a socialist farm commune where food, money, land, and expertise are
shared collectively by one and all.
The initial rush of enthusiasm, where everyone voluntarily
pools their resources and John is elected leader of the group, is tempered by
the youthful gee whiz mentality of their leader, which works fine in times of
plenty, but serves no purpose whatsoever when they run out of money and food,
where people’s spirits are already deflated, made even worse at the onset of
drought. In the face of ruinous
conditions, who should drop in but a platinum blonde, Jean Harlow-style
gangster’s moll, Sally (Barbara Pepper), who is welcomed like all the others,
but refuses to do any work, and instead lies around in her furs listening to
jazz records on her phonograph while also making eyes at the boss man, a
relationship that is inferred rather than shown, but takes place right under
the watchful eyes of Mary who is sorry she ever invited Sally into their
home. This sexual interlude is little
more than an unnecessary distraction to the overall story, but was reputedly
demanded by United Artists to sell tickets. John is such a wide-eyed idealist filled with
hopes and dreams, the idea that he’d want to run away with this floozy makes
little sense, though the temptation of sin and the city parallels similar themes
in F.W. Murnau’s masterwork SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS (1927), sending John
running back to the farm with a brainstorm.
So long as they’ve got the pumps working in the nearby reservoir, and
the collective has plenty of manpower, why don’t they dig a two-mile irrigation
waterway to their dying crops? This
renewed enthusiasm is matched with Soviet montage filmmaking, showing beauty in
the splendor of work, where in this stirring finale everyone digs to the rhythm
of the music, becoming a poetic homage to socialist collectivism. The film is reflective of a growing sentiment
in the 30’s where people were inspired by the idea of men and women working
together for the common good, an era when workers took advantage of their
collective power, which is in stark contrast to today’s individualism where
corporate power has isolated each worker, one from the other, which only
contributes to a growing economic insecurity for those at the bottom of the
wage scale. Vidor was instrumental in
founding the Directors Guild of America in 1936, becoming
the initial President for two years, and alongside John Ford, Frank Capra, and
Ernst Lubitsch, were central figures in 1930’s American cinema. It should be noted that Vidor’s film won
Moscow’s Lenin Film Festival prize, while Karen Morley, who played Mary, was
later named by Sterling Hayden as a communist sympathizer and blacklisted,
while Chaplin’s financing of the film was later used against him during the Red
Scare of 1950’s McCarthyism when he
was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, but decided to
leave the country permanently rather than testify. Ironically, Vidor himself eventually became a
conservative, while thirty years later peroxide blonde Barbara Pepper returned
to the country way of living in the 1960’s television sitcom Green Acres (1965 – 71), playing Doris, the
wife of Fred Ziffel (Hank Patterson).
