Word: vidor
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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Paramount and Fenway: "Our Dally Bread"--King Vidor's bold and excellent interpretation of the current of things social and economic. Depicts the back-to-the-farm movement in a moving and vivid style. Also "Kansas City Princess"--Joan Blondell and Glenda Farrel in another of their mildly amusing and risque pictures...
...average Hollywood producer, Depression furnished a number of tedious gags, a few new turns for old plots. But it failed to invest the cinema with much New Deal sentiment, much sense of economic ferment. This fact has long rankled in the impatient mind of thick-lipped, shock-haired King Vidor...
More than two years ago Director Vidor read an article on subsistence farming by Professor Malcolm McDermott of Duke University. What he felt about subsistence farming seemed too radical for the producers to whom Vidor offered his ideas. Besides, they believed the subject would be outdated before it reached the public. But Vidor's friends told him to go ahead and for a year Vidor hired a girl to do nothing but clip newspapers. Convinced that the common people were as interested in his theme as he was, he produced Our Daily Bread. Of it he says: "Not only...
...Director Vidor picked up his extras from the unemployed on Los Angeles streets, chose a dirt farm for his location where for two months he drew blue prints of each day's shooting. Result is a well-paced, high-pitched picture which, though it strikes no alarming political note, should help King Vidor keep his shirt...
Well cast and well photographed, Our Daily Bread is emotional rather than factual, directed by Vidor with a frequent eye to such devices as a shot of Mary knitting to show goodness, a shot of the wench playing a blues tune to show badness. Best sequence is the final one, done in the Russian manner. In it the community works furiously against time to dig an irrigation ditch from the river to their fields. Of this Director Vidor says: "I tried to develop it like a ballet. I aimed to get the effect of mounting drama through the movements...