King Vidor, a visionary Hollywood director whose vision often exceeded his grasp, had three big subjects on his bucket list: War (THE BIG PARADE/’25); Wheat (OUR DAILY BREAD) and Steel (AN AMERICAN ROMANCE/’44). This middle one, a tough studio sell which wound up self-produced and largely self-financed, spent years in subfusc Public Domain hell, giving its simplistic, even naive, Depression Era/back-to-the-land message an amateurish quality that accentuated its faults. But seen in a remastered KINO edition* makes for an enormous improvement, even the acting looks better. (Though it's still awkward as drama.) The story follows a struggling young couple (for Vidor, it's the same hard-luck Big City newlyweds of his silent THE CROWD/’28) taking on a bankrupt farm and running it as a community effort for down & out families of all sorts and professions. (Many a nationality & religion, but still no Blacks.) Karen Morley, as the wife; John Qualen, as the experienced farmer; and a menacing Addison Richards as a tough guy on the lam; give exceptional characterizations, with only Tom Keene’s husband (elected boss of the commune) bad enough to pull you out of the story. Keene was mostly in B-Westerns, but Vidor may have noted a strong resemblance . . . to himself! See Vidor’s late cameo appearance, yelling out ‘Okay to go!’ when the irrigation ditch is ready. And it’s that irrigation sequence that’s always been the film’s calling card, a bit of Soviet Constructionist Cinema Americana style. And now, in this fine looking print, the rest of the film is nearly worthy of its finale.
LINK: Watch on youtube - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzvERtI9MGA
SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY/DOUBLE-BILL: Idealistic as BREAD is, the depiction of rural life & values isn’t a patch on Vidor’s uncredited work in the opening Kansas scenes of THE WIZARD OF OZ/’39; nor his devastating rural romance in his still unheralded masterpiece THE STRANGER’S RETURN/’33.
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