Word: grasse
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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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...
Containing no dialog, with only 700 words of exposition by an unseen commentator, The Plow That Broke the Plains begins with lush, billowy grass, ends with the hulk of a dead tree surrounded by sun-baked desert. What happens between is shown in the arrival of the cattle on the great 400,000,000-acre pasture of the Plains, the inrush of speculators in the wake of the railroads. A homesteader's plow bites into soil held together by the deep roots of prairie grass. Warns a voice: ''Settler, plough at your peril!" A grizzled farmer observes...
...grass on which I lie is my floor...
...more happy, when, with heart's content, Fatigued he sinks into some pleasant lair Of wavy grass, and reads a debonair...
...that law was to restore the flow of cash benefits from Washington to the nation's farmers which the Supreme Court decision had rudely interrupted. Yet the Soil Conservation Act compelled no farmer to do anything about limiting his production. If he shifted cash crop acreage to grass, the Government would pay him something. If he did not, the Government was powerless to deal with him. The cotton farmer who tried to defy the old AAA's crop restrictions was always trapped by the old Bankhead Act which stopped him at the gin with a penalty...