King Vidor's "Our Daily Bread" (1934)
John Sims (Tom Keene) and his loving wife, Mary (Karen Morley), are city-dwellers hit hard by the financial fist of The Depression. John is a man with big ideas but little follow through. Unemployed, unable to find a job, and having no money with the economy being as depressed as it is, they are a few days away from being evicted, and thus homeless. Driven by bravery and sheer desperation, they flee to the country.
Not wanting a handout per se, Mary is hoping that moving to her Uncle Anthony's (Lloyd Ingraham) farm will at least provide John with a job. What Anthony offers them instead is an unused farm property, one hundred sixty acres, for which he has no use, to try to make a go of living off the land. The bank holding the mortgage doesn't care, as the value is virtually worthless. This at least gives them a place to live and work until they decide their next step.
It isn't until they arrive that they discover how little they know about farming. They have no idea what to do at first, as a transient Swede named Chris (John Qualen), passing by with his wife, Hilda (Alma Ferns), show them more about farming and rural life in one day than they could have imagined. Then John comes up with his next big idea, which is to amass others looking for work to form a cooperative on the farm.
John is able to find such like minded people, other downtrodden workers, solely by posting a sign along the road. They now have a collective of people, some from the big city, who combine their abilities to form a cooperative, and set up a farming community as a socialist style mini-society-commune based upon the teachings of Edward Gallafent (a belief in collectivism and a belief in the land). Each person, providing what they have available, would barter their services and belongings among themselves with others who need such. All work together on the farm, living on the property in small houses that they build themselves. All sharing equally what they have, and selling whatever surplus they may have, especially in what they raise, for other things they may need to purchase. The people, in turn, voting, that their governance structure will be John, the one who brought them all together, as "boss", with others assigned needed administrative roles.
The question then becomes whether John can follow through, especially when the situation throws the newborn community curve balls such as vicious raccoons, people in their midst who are solely out for themselves, and the long arm of the law.
The fickle nature of farming, which is highly reliant upon Mother Nature's cooperation, suffers many hardships. A severe drought is killing the crops, but ultimately this group of workers pull together to dig a ditch by hand, almost two miles long, to divert water from a creek to irrigate the crops, a remarkable technical achievement, and an exciting climactic montage with a joyous ending, overflowing with celebratory headstands, cartwheels, and muddy motorcycle wipeouts.
A 1934 American drama film (a/k/a "Hell's Crossroads") directed by King Vidor and starring Karen Morley, Tom Keene, and John Qualen. The film is a sequel to Vidor's silent classic "The Crowd" (1928), using the same characters although with different actors.
Vidor's beautiful, elemental images and editing create an energetic rhythm and symmetry as the people begin to realize a bread-based Utopia and become excited by the power of their collectivism. The final ditch-digging sequences took 10 days to stage and shoot.
Vidor tried to interest Irving Thalberg, production chief at MGM--director King Vidor's home studio--in the project; but after being rejected by MGM, Vidor took the project to RKO and worked out a deal where he would forgo his director's salary, but receive a $25,000 advance and 50% of the gross over double the negative cost, and post a $50,000 bond to cover cost overruns on a $250,000 budget. The deal was nixed by RKO's legal department when they realized Vidor could profit more than the studio.
Charles Chaplin was interested in the film and was able to secure a United Artists release for it. Unfortunately, banks were reluctant to back a film with that subject matter. Vidor then set up his own production company, Viking Productions, with himself as the sole owner and produced the film himself, starting the picture with $90,000 of his own money. Our Daily Bread was a box-office disappointment. Vidor said he "just about broke even."
The New York Times called the film "a social document of amazing vitality and emotional impact." It was so convincing in its socialist messaging that its release in California was delayed so as not to help Upton Sinclair in the 1934 gubernatorial election.
In the early 1950s, Orson Welles chose this film as one of his 10 favorite movies of all time.
In 2015, the United States Library of Congress selected the film for preservation in the National Film Registry, finding it "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".