King Vidor's 1934 film Our Daily Bread is aptly named, as the film is about a prayer rather than an actual solution to the Great Depression. Like other socio-political films of the time, it seeks to offer a solution to the problems faced by so many Americans. However, Vidor's message gets lost somewhere amidst the film's poor production, bad acting, and inconsistent ideology. For these reasons what comes out in the end is an almost silly climax with little realism that offers the same help that an escapist vehicle from the same period would offer. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on "Why Violent Video Games Shouldn't Be Banned"? Get an Original Essay Vidor's vision first began with his 1928 classic film of a couple subjugated by the big city, The Crowd, which is the first part of a series of films Vidor wanted to make that depicted life of average American men and women (Vidor 221). The film follows the protagonist, John, as he works like a slave in his office doing paperwork like so many other insignificant men. When John leaves work he's still going through the motions, because his courtship and marriage to the film's heroine, Mary, seems part of the town routine. Their marriage is encompassed by the city that suffers until Mary becomes pregnant. Here Vidor emphasizes his point with his images of births in quantity (Bergman 76). John's downfall in the film begins with the death of his son. Hit on the street by a truck, the child lies dying while John seems to try to fight the sights and sounds of the city that killed his daughter. Her death continues to haunt John as he relives the scene over and over at work. Eventually he loses his job and his wife, and walks around with nothing to live for. He eventually reunites with Mary and they attend a show, where on the program is an advertising slogan for which he is responsible. He rejoices in this achievement and then manages to laugh at the spectacle, joining the rest of the people in the crowd. It is a touching and realistic ending that Vidor called A perfectly natural ending to the story of Mr. Anyman (Bergman 76). In the early 1930s Vidor wanted to take the trials and turmoil of the common man and put it into a film, so he read as many articles as he could on the subject (Vidor 220). He came across an article by a university professor in Readers Digest that proposed the implementation of agricultural cooperatives as a solution to unemployment. Vidor used this concept to formulate his story with his wife, and the two of them began working on the screenplay. They finished the story in four months, which they titled Our Daily Bread. It followed the trend of other back-to-the-land films released in 1933, such as King Kong, State Fair, The Life of Jimmy Dolan, and Strangers Return. Once the script was finished, Vidor tried to sell the idea to Irving Thalberg at MGM. , but although he expressed sympathy for the story, he does not feel it was appropriate for MGM (Vidor 221). Vidor had no better luck with anyone else until he turned to Charlie Chaplin, co-owner of United Artists. UA agreed to publish the photo, but Vidor still had to produce it himself. To get financing he pledged everything he could, raising around $125,000 to finance his film. With this money Vidor was able to make his film about an ideal social system, where people work together towards a common goal with a relationship based on trust to form a utopian community, which shows the romantic idealist in Vidor (Welsh 446). Vidor wanted to take the same onesprotagonists of The Crowd, John and Mary, and put them in Our Daily Bread so we can move them out of the city and show them in a rural setting. Vidor wanted to offer an alternative lifestyle that involved moving away from the big cities and living off the land. His conception of agricultural cooperatives suggested a move away from industrialization and, instead, a move away from industrialization to refocus on the country's agricultural forces to pull us out of the Depression. In Our Daily Bread, John and Mary start out in the city, both jobless. They get a break when a relative of Mary's gives them the rights to an abandoned farm, so they turn around and leave the city for the countryside. However, their ignorance in agriculture pushes them to help others, an immigrant farmer and his family. They know how to cultivate and offer their services in exchange for the possibility of remaining on the land with them. This starts a trend as they begin to welcome jobless people passing through. The community that forms is made up of people of all professions; there's even a criminal who acts as the commune's policeman. And they also get into trouble with the town slut, platinum blonde Sally. With the people in place, the commune holds a meeting around the fire to decide what direction they want their cooperative to go. John is willing to hand over ownership of the land to the group. A lot of political rhetoric of various kinds goes on, with ideas ranging from fascist to socialist to communist, but the group is content to have a strong leader in a democratic system, and that leader is John, despite his inexperience in farming. The commune runs into trouble when drought comes and the corn crop is in danger. The commune has to scavenge for food because they have no money to buy supplies. The criminal offers to turn himself in to the authorities so that the commune can collect the $500 reward offered for him, but the commune refuses. The problems the commune has cause John to lose interest not only in the farm but also in his wife as he falls in love with Sally. When things look darkest, John decides to return to town with Sally. However, shortly after leaving John has a vision of an irrigation canal they can build from a nearby stream that can save the crops. He turns around and presents his idea to the commune, they believe it and get to work digging it up. The sequences were shot by Vidor as if it were a ballet (Vidor 224). The films end with the moat being a success, with full and healthy crops in a very fantasy ending. It's this lack of realism that makes Our Daily Bread an inferior film, especially as a follow-up to The Crowd. The Crowd was a harrowing look at the madness of city life that showed how contentment could only be achieved by losing one's sense of self. Our Daily Bread is an unrealistic solution to Depression, also hampered by terrible acting and characters, especially John, played by Tom Keene. The bad acting can perhaps be excused by the fact that Vidor didn't have much of a budget to work with, but the character he presented in John was not a good example of a working class hero. John is weak and incompetent and it is not logical for the cooperative to elect him as leader. When things get tough, John takes the opportunity to run away with Sally. And it's not the guilt of leaving his wife that brings him back, but his vision of an irrigation canal that brings him back. His vision of the irrigation canal is also a questionable plot device. John is not the expert farmer, but the immigrant who first arrived at the cooperative is. It is unreasonable to conceive that thousands of years of human development of agricultural techniques went.