Word: films
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...that idea nothing came, partly because neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives is equipped for sound cinema, partly because of Republican opposition. Nevertheless the film the President saw went to Congress as an official Federal document, is the first motion picture ever placed in Congressional archives. By last week this film, called The Plow That Broke the Plains, was making exciting news in & out of the cinema industry...
History. Government departments, notably that of Agriculture, have made many a dull, amateurish film to be shown to school children. To Dr. Rexford Guy Tugwell's Resettlement Administration nearly a year ago went Cinema Critic Pare Lorentz (Judge, McCall's) with an idea: Let the U. S. Government, heretofore backward in using the cinema, make a really good picture of the history of the Great Plains, showing how part of it became a dread "Dust Bowl" and how the Resettlement Administration was trying to rehabilitate its farmers. Critic Lorentz sold his idea, was at once chosen to direct...
Lorentz and his crew filmed grass, cattle, dust in half a dozen western States, wound up in California. Farmers performed easily before the camera, found nothing odd in re-enacting their personal tragedy. At one point Photographers Steiner, Strand and Hurwitz grew fretful because The Plow That Broke the Plains was not forceful enough. When they saw the finished job. however, they withdrew objections. By that time two more notable names were on the film's credit list, on the Federal payroll: Composer Virgil Thomson (Four Saints in Three Acts), who provided a musical score, and Alexander Smallens...
...dust that followed when drought, heat and winds struck the acres that should never have been plowed. From the Dust Bowl in their automobiles, in the summer of 1935, emigrate 30,000 refugees a month to seek whatever jobs they can on the roads leading Westward. Epilog of the film shows how the Resettlement Administration is transplanting 4,500 stranded families to new houses on small farms in ten States...
...that the Federal Government could find no satisfactory way to distribute it to the country. According to Director Lorentz, Hollywood had been suspiciously noncooperative from the start. Most cinema producers frankly hate the New Deal and are therefore in no mood to handle the distribution of a New Deal film at any price, even if it is as effective and exciting as The Plow That Broke the Plains. Their ostensible reason for keeping this "propaganda" film off the screens of their cinema houses: running 28 minutes, it is too long for a newsreel, too short for a feature...