by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2012 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
In the wake of the Ken Burns
mini-series The Dust Bowl I had downloaded from archive.org Pare Lorentz’s 1936 film The Plow
That Broke the Plains, a 25-minute documentary
produced by the U.S. government back when Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress
Administration (WPA) had hired people not only to dig ditches and build
bridges, highways and government buildings (many of them still in use today!)
but to do some pretty far-afield things like put on plays, write books (mostly
travel guidebooks giving the histories and listing the attractions of some of
America’s historic regions) and make movies. The Burns show had mentioned this
film and had said that when it was shown in the still-operating movie theatres
in the Dust Bowl region itself, audiences hadn’t liked it, partly because they
went to the movies to escape the reality instead of watching it bigger than life on screen, and
partly because they felt insulted by it since the film essentially blamed the
Dust Bowl crisis on the farmers themselves for plowing up too much marginal
land and expecting to make a living out of farming wheat in places with big
winds, hot sun and very little rain.
Ironically, the Ken Burns documentary
basically told the same story from the same point of view, though it had nearly
four hours to tell it in versus Pare Lorentz’ 25 minutes; Lorentz’ take on it
goes back at least to the 1890’s and the battles between cattlemen and
homesteaders over the future of the Great Plains, which have been the subject
of innumerable Westerns (from Oklahoma! and Shane to Heaven’s Gate); first the cattlemen moved in after the land was
“cleared” (an astonishing euphemism showing that even a man as self-consciously
Leftist as Lorentz wasn’t immune to the prejudices of his time) of the Indians
and the buffalo, and grazed their herds on the native grasses that had
previously supported the buffalo (and the Native Americans who depended on them
for food, clothing and
shelter!); then the farmers came in and their plows started to break the plains
(the marvelously punning title — “broke” in the sense of opening the soil for
tilling and planting, and “broke” in the sense of destroying — is one of the
best things about this film) and they started eking out a marginal existence;
then World War I opened up huge new markets for wheat and the plains farmers
took advantage of the war-driven boom (and the bubble-driven boom of the 1920’s
which followed) and a decade or so of really good rainfall to plant wheat and
harvest bumper crops which they could sell for a lot of money; then the
national economy collapsed in 1929 and the farm ecology of the Plains states
collapsed two years later, leading to the Dust Bowl and the catastrophe Lorentz
and his squad of four cinematographers — Leo T. Hurwitz, Ralph Steiner, Paul
Strand and Paul Ivano — captured in images of heart-stopping beauty and horror
even in the poor-quality print available on archive.org. (According to a
“trivia” note on imdb.com, all the camerapeople except Ivano — perhaps not
coincidentally, the only one who’d had Hollywood experience; he’d worked on
Valentino’s films in the 1920’s and made a comeback in the 1940’s as a noir specialist — walked out on the production because
they wanted a more visually oriented, less narration-driven approach than
Lorentz’s.)
What’s most amazing about The Plow That Broke the Plains today is its obvious debt to the films of the
Soviet Union, Eisenstein’s in particular (but then this was an era in which
virtually every progressive filmmaker in the world regarded Eisenstein as a
god; I can remember Charles and I watching John Grierson’s first film, the 1929
silent documentary Drifters, and noting its obvious debt to Battleship Potemkin even though the sailors in Eisenstein’s film were
starting a revolution while the ones in Grierson’s were just catching herring);
it’s essentially a work of socialist realism done in and about the U.S. Even
the rather emphatic narration by Thomas Chalmers (not exactly one of the golden
throats of the day) has the air of the Popular Front about it, its attempt to
communicate the ideas of the Left in the folksy tones its city-bred creators
hoped would make the point to rural audiences (and the narration got awfully
patronizing and preachy at times but it still marks a time when the Left actually tried to reach out to middle America in general and
rural America in particular instead of regarding it as hopelessly beyond the
pale).
The most famous element of The Plow That Broke the Plains (and of Lorentz’s follow-up, the 1937 documentary The
River, about the Mississippi) is
the original musical score by Virgil Thomson, conducted by Alexander Smallens
(who also conducted the world premiere production of Porgy and Bess), which essentially is in what could be called the
“Americana” vein of Aaron Copland except that Thomson was writing that way
before Copland was. Thomson even uses the same Western folk song, “I Ride an
Old Paint,” that Copland used in the slow “Saturday Night Waltz” section of his
ballet Rodeo six years later. The
Plow That Broke the Plains is
visually stunning (it’s a hymn to the effectiveness of the red filter, a device
that alas became unusable once color replaced black-and-white as the movie
standard), narratively creaky, musically fascinating (Leopold Stokowski made a
famous LP of the scores for this and The River and more recently the films have been reissued on
DVD with Smallens’ versions of the scores erased and new recordings of Thomson’s
music dubbed in) and a real period piece even though Ken Burns not only showed
the opening credits in The Dust Bowl but also included, as if it were actual newsreel footage, the shots of
a farmer (Bam White) and his family packing up their meager goods in their car
and trailer before setting off to flee the Dust Bowl.
