Here are two films I highly recommend. The first is Our Daily Bread (1934) by King Vidor, whose most well-known works were from the silent era. It was filmed and set during the Depression and stars Karen Morley and Tom Keene as Mary and John Sims, a couple down on their luck and behind in rent. Their bad luck turns around when Mary’s wealthy uncle offers them a farm in the mid-West. Ultimately, it’s a story about how the two form a communal farm with people of various backgrounds and beat the odds.
Remember, it is from the 1930s so the acting is melodramatic and campy, but it does represent a powerful social characteristic of the time – communal organization and working with others as opposed to the individualistic alienation so common today. For that it’s worth watching.
Marxist critic Louis Proyect describes his reaction to this aspect of the film as follows:
When watching “Our Daily Bread,” I was reminded of my visits to farm cooperatives in Sandinista Nicaragua. There is something truly inspiring about men and women working together to produce for their common good. It is one of the great contradictions of American society that with every increase in abundance since the 1930s, there has been a concomitant decrease in the potential for group solidarity. Workers used to think in terms of their collective power. Now they see themselves more as individual actors looking for ways to benefit themselves and their family. Although nobody can predict when this will change, we can be sure that as economic insecurity grows working men and women will once again be forced to look to each other for mutual aid.
Next is the 1954 classic Salt of the Earth. Salt was a far more controversial film than Our Daily Bread. The director, Herbert Biberman, who along with nine other Hollywood writers and directors, had actually spent six months in prison prior to making it on charges of contempt of Congress as a result of hearings held by the U.S. House Committee on Un-American Activities.
Here’s a synopsis of the film from Wikipedia:
Salt of the Earth (1954) is an American drama film written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. All had been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment due to their involvement in socialist politics.
The movie became a historical phenomenon and has a cult following due to how the United States establishment (politicians, journalists, studio executives, and other trade unions) dealt with the film. Salt of the Earth is one of the first pictures to advance the feminist social and political point-of-view.
In 1950–1951, in the fictional village of Zinc Town, New Mexico, the drama tells the story of a long and difficult strike led by Mexican-American and Anglo miners against the Empire Zinc Company. The film shows how the miners (the union men and their wives), the company, and the police, react during the strike. In neorealist style the producers and director used actual miners and their families as actors in the film.
Both films are public domain and freely distributable online.
