Our Daily Bread And Other Films Of The Great Depression (Full Frame)

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Franklin Roosevelt's 1933 inauguration marked a rebirth of hope among Americans and inaugurated an era of government activity and social experiment designed to pull the country out of the great economic depression in which it had been mired for years. Although Hollywood movies, especially those made under the Production Code, were intended as escapist entertainment and seldom addressed issues of the time, the independent "Our Daily Bread" and the superb nonfiction films in this collection not only accurately mirror the 1930s but also are eloquent works of artistic merit. "Our Daily Bread" (1934) is a landmark of socially conscious films, produced and directed by King Vidor, who made such earlier masterworks as "The Big Parade", "The Crowd", "Hallelujah!", and "The Champ". This deeply personal work was rejected by the studios, nor could Vidor obtain bank financing for a film reflecting unfavorably on banks. In the end he mortgaged his home and most of his possessions to finance "Our Daily Bread", which was released by United Artists at the insistence of its partner and Vidor's friend, Charlie Chaplin. The film advocates a back-to-the-land lifestyle for dispossessed urbanites; it was inspired by the actual cooperative pictured in "The New Frontier", a government documentary also included on this DVD. The finale of "Our Daily Bread", which depicts digging an irrigation ditch, is one of the classic sequences in all of American cinema. In the 1983 "Prologue To Our Daily Bread", an elderly Vidor briefly remembers the story behind his pioneering film.