The Plow That Broke the Plains

Note the written prologue states that the film will show what "we" (European settlers) "did" with a half-million square miles of high plains once the swath was "cleared" of Indians and buffalo. Now, the visuals start with waving seas of native grassland, and since the narrative follows an historical timeline, this is a depiction of the land before European settlers arrived. The land may have been harsh and dry—"treeless, windblown, and without rivers or streams"—but it did support rich fields of native grass. In contrast, the visuals end with a stark depiction of the 1930's dustbowl— great clouds of topsoil swept up from a land stripped bare by drought and plowing away of the native grass cover. The images are bleak, searing, and unforgettable.

I call attention to this because a literal reading of the prologue matched against these opening and closing shots is hardly a tale of triumph. The plow that broke the plains really did break them, it appears-- at least to this point in 1936. Hopefully, an improved agronomy has prevented these latter scenes from repeating.

Nonetheless, the documentary itself represents a triumph of artistic imagery (Lorenz) and musical score (Thompson)— and a tribute to its New Deal sponsors. From the first lone rider to the great cattle herds to the mighty plows to soaring WWI demand and finally to the dustbowl and its refugees, the story is elegantly related. I agree that the narration too often goes over the top, but the basic idea works. And I really like that last shot of the lone tree skeleton with its tiny bird's nest looking hopefully to the future. All in all, the 25 minutes adds up to a powerful work of documentary art.

(In passing—I think there are two ways of construing the rather puzzling shots of British WWI tanks plowing forward. In context, the tank armies are juxtaposed with armies of tractors plowing over the plains. Thus, we might view each army as subduing a resistant foe, in the latter case, a difficult land. Or, possibly, the tractors can be taken as a mechanized army of harvesters supplying foodstuffs for a mechanized army of tanks. And even though the two construals may be taken as odes to the power of mechanization, I detect a dark undercurrent to the film as a whole that hardly coincides with the usual tales of "the winning of the West".)

Not quite ten years past the first full length talkie, this movie commentary could easily be imagined as written with intertitles. As another nod to the silent tradition, the music conveys much of the story, partly out of habit and partly to avoid they criticisms from the film industry had mounted against the film while still in production that the movie was simply a propaganda piece financed by the Roosevelt administration. The filmed images were necessary to educate people around the nation, be they politicians who railed against yet another alphabet organization to conserve the plains, or to the common people who saw the haunted "Okies" with sand blasted cars and faces coming to their states as unwelcome. For this reason, the film deserves to be preserved and viewed.

If you are having trouble finding the film, go to Wikipedia and click on "The Internet Archives" hypertext to see the movie online. If you want to get to the heartbreaking stories behind this enormous catastrophe, do read "The Worst Hard Time" by Timothy Egan, as recommended by another commentator. You will even get the background story to the mustachioed plowman and his family.

Viewers who insist on judging past attitudes by today's standards will hate or dismiss this film (see several examples.) Whether it was a propaganda piece or an educational one when it was made, it is now one of the most immediate visual records we have of the dust bowl and the migration that resulted from it, a monumental achievement which can never be duplicated, and one which influenced both American music and documentary film-making in an essential way. For many years it was shown in U.S. Schools, which is where I first saw it about 55 years ago, in the early 1950s with their emphasis on bread-basket America and the promise of farming technology. With a proper introduction by teachers, even the jingoistic narration could be made useful. As a record of where our country has been, it's an invaluable, irreplaceable document.

This is a well-regarded documentary whose director is better-known as a movie reviewer. Though not readily translating into entertainment, the film has historical and educational value even today: it deals with the way the vast American grasslands were, first, laboriously cultivated – from which teeming cities emerged – and, then, badly damaged – at the pretext of inevitable progress – resulting in what came to be known as "The Dustbowl".

While I was wary at first that it would be a celebration of collective farming a' la the recently-viewed EARTH (1930), the half-hour short does not smooth over the pitfalls involved; indeed, it ultimately comes across as a cautionary exercise…yet one that looks hopefully towards the future (as the problem, we are told, is already being earnestly tackled by the Government). Incidentally, this subject often found its way into both literature and commercial cinema – most notably in John Ford's superb 1940 adaptation of John Steinbeck's "The Grapes Of Wrath".

Pare Lorentz was unknown until he made documentaries during the Great Depression on the devastation of the Dust Bowl in the Southern Plains. This film featured an actual farmer whose son is in one of the Dust Bowl documentaries as well. The documentary is short but focuses on the history of the Dust Bowl and the plow that destroyed the land in the plains. I am disappointed that it is short nor does it interview any of the dust bowl survivors. The Dust Bowl is an important part of understanding why it happened and how the plains were destroyed to learn to respect the land and the soil. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's program hired artists like film directors and photographers to explain the disaster to the rest of the country and the world in order to support to help the Southern Plains where wheat ruled supreme until the black blizzard where billions of tons of sand and dirt blew across the country, causing death and destruction, and where John Steinbeck's novel, "The Grapes of Wrath," has a family who migrated west in search of a better life.