Our Daily Bread (1934)

Directed by King Vidor. Starring Tom Keene, Karen Morley, Addison Richards, John Qualen, Barbara Pepper, Lloyd Ingraham.

Vidor’s companion piece to his The Crowd was self-financed and is as hokey as the day is long, but interesting enough to warrant a watch. The lead roles of the earlier picture have been “recast” with Keene and Morley (the names and character types are the same, but their circumstances and the time periods suggest they’re not actually the same people), and rather than continue struggling in the urban rat race amid the Great Depression, they decide to abandon the city and live off the land, eventually building a socialist commune that they share with dozens of others. The leads are wooden and the script is a dated social document, but it’s steadily-paced and builds to an exhilarating irrigation project finale—a physical and visual triumph that’s sorely lacking in almost all of the trite character drama that preceded it.

62/100