Our Daily Bread

Though its politics are nebulous, King Vidor’s self-financed portrayal of the Depression-era “back to the land” movement can only be described as “commonist,” with a celebration of collective labor derived from Eisenstein and Dovzhenko, if not from Lenin or Stalin. The characterizations are formulaic and the plot implausible, but there is real exhilaration in the concluding sequence, after the boss of the collective decides not to run away with the floozy, and the men band together to beat the drought by digging an irrigation ditch from a mountain stream to their dusty corn patch. (1934, dvd, n.) *5+*