Our Daily Bread

Two miles of ditch dug by hand to bring the water, cut to a drumbeat, the men and the shovels and the water arriving: that sequence is the reason the film is remembered. John and Mary Sims, the couple from The Crowd under other actors, are broke in the city, take over a foreclosed farm, and form a cooperative with the others who come, and argue about how to run it, through a drought. King Vidor mortgaged his house to make it, and the politics were called socialist and fascist in the same week. Karen Morley, Tom Keene, and Barbara Pepper as the blonde who nearly takes John away. Viking Productions for United Artists, 1934.