The Plow That Broke the Plains

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.

The reviewer above doesn't know much about what happened in the Dust Bowl in the 1930s. By all means watch this film and listen very closely. You can almost hear the chainsaws in the Amazon from here...

This film is a priceless collection of imagery that documents what happened to that region of the country. A region that has never fully recovered from the damage humans did to it.

It is a stark look at what degenerated into a self inflicted hell, which was by no means entirely the fault of the farmers. They simply didn't know what they were doing until it was too late. As usual, the one man who stood up and tried to point out what had occurred was decried as a crank.

Thank goodness Roosevelt commissioned this film or we would have precious few moving images of the desolation that resulted.

(Also recommend: The Worst Hard Time. The untold story of those who survived the Great American Dust Bowl, by Timothy Egan.)

Plow That Broke the Plains, The (1936)

*** (out of 4)

Pare Lorentz directed and wrote this documentary that takes a look at the Dust Bowl era and the reasons it happened. The opening title sequence gives us a brief story of how good American's always got rid of bad things on their land and the film says what a good thing is was that we drove the Indians off the land. That might not go over too well today but outside of that this is a pretty good short documentary. I've read that some consider this one of the finest ever made but I wouldn't go that far. The cinematography is terrific as is the music score but the telling of the story isn't the greatest I've seen. According to the IMDb five cinematographers were used because no one could give the director what he wanted for the film.

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".