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King Vidor's L'Angélus, as it were, with elemental triumphs as spacious and limpid as Millet's. The big city hasn't improved much since The Crowd, the Sims (Tom Keene and Karen Morley) still have to dodge bill-collectors and barter for goods (an ukelele will only get them a scrawny fowl at the butcher shop). The rich uncle has advice for hard times: "Back to the land, all that sort of stuff." A dilapidated farm is the couple's new starting point, visitors promptly join the dream of "a community where money isn't important." Opposite poles of government are proposed (a jowly orator for one, a gaunt undertaker for the other), "one common pot" is the co-op answer. The homey surrealism of plows pulled by jalopies, the first furrow sprouts in tandem with childbirth, terra mater for Depression babies. Dovzhenko's Earth and Murnau's City Girl in the rear-view mirror, Renoir's Le Crime de Monsieur Lange and Ray's Distant Thunder on the road ahead: "My gosh, ain't you anticipatory!" Optimism and despair, conviction and temptation, all a matter of getting your hands into the soil in this vigorous agitprop pamphlet. Vidor made it outside of Hollywood yet Hollywood comes knocking all the same as the platinum Jezebel (Barbara Pepper) whose urban jauntiness threatens to unsettle Keene's agrarian diligence. The foiled auction, the tight-lipped recluse (Addison Richards) who sacrifices himself with a reward poster and returns as an apparition in the husband's moment of doubt, the miracle of solidarity. The celebrated irrigation sequence connects surging stream and scrambling humanity, a choreography of bodies and tools capped by the great dissolve from dust cloud to thirsty cornfield. A beautiful American vision, scanning the troubled horizon and voicing a solution in John Qualen's immigrant accent: "Go get your shovel." With Henry Hall, Lloyd Ingraham, Sidney Bracey, and Nellie V. Nichols. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |