"OUR DAILY BREAD"

Press, Volume LXX, Issue 21323, 16 November 1934, Page 5

"OUR DAILY BREAD "

! REBEL PRODUCER'S EPIC I ■ VIDOR'S FILM OF THE LANE* To describe King Vidor'a"Our Daily Bread" as the most significant cinema event of the year is to state a plain fact plainly. Apart from its considerable merits as a striking drama of the soil, it is momentous in its implications. In this story of a co-operative land colony which is peopled by unemployed workers from the city, Mr Vidor brings the American motion picture up to date. Being a fine technician as well as a man of vision, he has articulated his dreams on the screen with vigour and imagination, and it is impossible not to thrill to them. In "Our Daily Bread" he makes Hollywood aware of the world outside the smoky cubicles of its scenario writers. He plunges the laggard cinema into the fearful and epic maelstrom of a nation in torment, informs the film city of the dramatic and tragic era of which it is a part, and points out for the information of the motionpicture caliphs the sweep and variety of the profoundly stirring events which fill the front pages of our newspapers day after day. In his new work Mr Vidor clarifies the potential greatness of the screen as a medium for mirroring the modern world. For his theme is as topical as the N.R.A. It coTftes to the screen pungent and smoking from the front page. It is the sorrowful'theme of hungry men who have carried their dreams, their search for beauty and dignity in life, and their personal integrity to the breadlines and the relief agencies. It is a prophetic and marvellously touching thing to a public which has been surfeited with tinsel make-believe, while the whole seething kaleidoscope of the passing American scene ached for the camera.

King Vidor's Independence

It is a remarkable commentary on the insulated and myopic standards of. the picture-makers that a director as distinguished as Mr Vidor was forced to cut himself loose from Hollywood before he could make "Our Daily Bread." For the photoplay is Mr Vidor's declaration of independence after two decades of relentless struggles to preserve his artistic selfrespect from t!--2 onslaughts of the cinema's box-office philosophers. When he decided to create a screen drama out of the back-to-the-land movement, a subject of obvious pictorial promise as well as a subject of vitaL interest to millions of Americants, he was laughed down by several of the major studios as a dangerous revolutionary. Charlie Chaplin encouraged him to continue. Joseph M Schenck offered him the facilities of the United Artists' releasing agency. He sank what money he could accumulate into the enterprise and with magnificent courage produced the photoplay himself with a cast composed almost entirely of unknown players, many of whom he picked from unemployed men and women in the streets in order to save the expense of going to the casting offices. , ~ . _ The history of the production gains in interest when Mr Vidor's position in the film world is recalled. In the days when he was conforming to the Hollywood creed he stood in the first rank of directors, and he was one of the highest salaried men in the business When he is willing to meet his employers half-way .he can produce such potent box-office lures as "The Big Parade," "Street Scene, and "Wife of the Centaur." But his career in Hollywood has been a perpetual battle to gain a hearing for the themes that lie close to his heart and which are warm in his imagination, the themes of '"Hallelujah," "The " Crowd." and "Our Daily Bread." Use of Rhythm As a director Mr Vidor possesses a superb equipment. Ho has spent more than half his life with cameras. He has a natural sense of iilmic motion, which is not as ordinary a talent among film directors as it should be, and he owns an imagination which is alive to the mutations of drama in the daily life of ordinary men and women. He has evolved some spectacular effects with his highly-developed technique of artificial tempo and stylised realism. A splendid example of his method was the slow advance of the American troops through the wood in "The Big Parade," the men walking deliberately and rhythmically into an annihilating machine-gun fire, line after line of the green troops cut away like wheat, new men taking their places and resuming the artificially arrested tempo. In "Our Daily Bread" he achieves a similar effect by using a metronome to create an artificial rhythm in the movement of the workers as they build the irrigation ditch which is to save the corn crop from the drought. The methodical, rhythmic, up-and-down motifn of shovel and pickaxe, accelerating in beat as the scene progresses to its denouement, finally produces a climax of sheer hysteria, so that there is a powerful impulse in the spectator to scream and cheer when the water come plunging down the ditch to relieve the famished crops.

Fruitfulness of the Land Nobody who possesses an adult interest in the cinema and its artistic possibilities can afford to miss this powerful and invigorating drama of a subsistence homestead. Based on the return to the soil motif which President Roosevelt recommended in his inaugural address as a partial solution

for the unemployment crisis, it is an indnitely touching song of faith in the eternal fruitfulness of the land and an inspiring chant of hope for the future. In its courageous departure from the established mode of film entertainment, it is a challenge to the intelligence and imagination of the iilm public, and an answer to the general demand for. a grown-up cinema. If by some miracle "Our Daily Bread" were to succeed, thus confounding the gloomy prophecies of the film experts who expect it to prove a colossal failure, its success would be the most heartening event of the season.