Our Daily Bread (1934)

Our Daily Bread is a 1934 film directed by King Vidor and starring Karen Morley, Tom Keene, and John Qualen. The movie is a sequel to Vidor's silent classic The Crowd (1928), using the same characters although with different actors. Vidor tried to interest Irving Thalberg of MGM in the project, but Thalberg, who had greenlighted the earlier film, rejected the idea. Vidor then produced the film himself and released it through United Artists.

The film is also known as Hell's Crossroads, an American reissue title.

Synopsis

The film depicts a couple, down on their luck during the Great Depression, who move to a farm to try to make a go of living off the land. They don't have a clue at first, but soon find other people down on their luck to help them. Soon they have a collective of people, some from the big city, who work together on a farm. There is a severe drought, killing the crops. The people then dig a ditch by hand almost two miles long to divert water from a creek to irrigate the crops. The film is an entertaining, uplifting political allegory about the virtues of collective, non-corporate action, self-sufficiency, and the rewards of hard-work rather than the rewards of rapacious finance capitalism; it is not an instructional "how-to" film from an agricultural institute; consequently, the film ends with the people celebrating wildly in the water then harvesting the crops, not showing how they managed to direct the narrow stream of water over the huge plain to evenly irrigate the crops.

Actors