Documented Dust

On the second floor of the White House one Sunday night last March occurred a world cinema premiere. When it was over President Roosevelt, brimming with enthusiasm, turned to his Congressional guests with a bright idea. He would, he said, send a print of this film with a covering message to Congress, which would view it at a joint session.

Of that idea nothing came, partly because neither the Senate nor the House of Representatives is equipped for sound cinema, partly because of Republican opposition. Nevertheless the film the President saw went to Congress as an official Federal document, is the first motion picture ever placed in Congressional archives. By last week this film, called The Plow That Broke the Plains, was making exciting news in & out of the cinema industry.

History. Government departments, notably that of Agriculture, have made many a dull, amateurish film to be shown to school children. To Dr. Rexford Guy Tugwell's Resettlement Administration nearly a year ago went Cinema Critic Pare Lorentz (Judge, McCall's) with an idea: Let the U. S. Government, heretofore backward in using the cinema, make a really good picture of the history of the Great Plains, showing how part of it became a dread "Dust Bowl" and how the Resettlement Administration was trying to rehabilitate its farmers. Critic Lorentz sold his idea, was at once chosen to direct the projected picture. Rather than have the film made on contract by an outside organization, he was put on the Resettlement Administration's payroll. By the time Lorentz was ready to begin shooting last September, he had employed a trio of cameramen, all able, all Left-wing in politics. Ralph Steiner, 37, gained fame as a still photographer, currently earns his bread-&-butter doing color work for Ladies' Home Journal, has made several cinema shorts including H2O, Surf and Sea Weed, Pie in the Sky. Paul Strand, one-time protege of Alfred Stieglitz. did a film called Redes for the Mexican Government. Leo Hurwitz has excited Leftist audiences with shorts on the "Scottsboro Boys" and a Washington hunger march.

Lorentz and his crew filmed grass, cattle, dust in half a dozen western States, wound up in California. Farmers performed easily before the camera, found nothing odd in re-enacting their personal tragedy. At one point Photographers Steiner, Strand and Hurwitz grew fretful because The Plow That Broke the Plains was not forceful enough. When they saw the finished job. however, they withdrew objections. By that time two more notable names were on the film's credit list, on the Federal payroll: Composer Virgil Thomson (Four Saints in Three Acts), who provided a musical score, and Alexander Smallens, who conducted it.

Picture. By last week The Plow That Broke the Plains had been privately previewed by Hollywood directors, by Interior Department and Resettlement Administration officials and by a group of Congressmen, diplomats, Supreme Court Justices and New Dealers at Washington's Hotel Mayflower. What they all saw was 2,700 ft. of handsome photography detailing a so-year history of how Man has made deserts of the Great Plains.

Containing no dialog, with only 700 words of exposition by an unseen commentator, The Plow That Broke the Plains begins with lush, billowy grass, ends with the hulk of a dead tree surrounded by sun-baked desert. What happens between is shown in the arrival of the cattle on the great 400,000,000-acre pasture of the Plains, the inrush of speculators in the wake of the railroads. A homesteader's plow bites into soil held together by the deep roots of prairie grass. Warns a voice: ''Settler, plough at your peril!" A grizzled farmer observes, without comprehending, the first sign of drought. Then comes a Wartime boom in which higher & higher prices are quickly followed by more & more wheat planting until the grass that once bound this country together has given way to endless fields under a parching sun. Finally, to mournful music by Composer Thomson, are shown the ravages of the drifting dust that followed when drought, heat and winds struck the acres that should never have been plowed. From the Dust Bowl in their automobiles, in the summer of 1935, emigrate 30,000 refugees a month to seek whatever jobs they can on the roads leading Westward. Epilog of the film shows how the Resettlement Administration is transplanting 4,500 stranded families to new houses on small farms in ten States.

"Documentary Films" are what the modern cinema calls non-fiction pictures, exclusive of newsreels, travelogs and similar shorts. When made by governments, as most documentary films are, they are usually interlarded with propaganda. Typical were the pictures shown along with The Plow That Broke the Plains in Washington's Mayflower last fortnight: an excerpt from The Triumph of the Will, directed for Adolf Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl (TIME, Feb. 7); an institutional reel called Midi dealing with the French railways; a Russian Harvest Festival which depicts the Ukraine as a merry place; Color Box and The Face of Britain, respectively glorifying the British Post Office and the social effect of water power.

What made The Plow That Broke the Plains news last week, a year after it was begun and weeks after it was completed, was that the Federal Government could find no satisfactory way to distribute it to the country. According to Director Lorentz, Hollywood had been suspiciously noncooperative from the start. Most cinema producers frankly hate the New Deal and are therefore in no mood to handle the distribution of a New Deal film at any price, even if it is as effective and exciting as The Plow That Broke the Plains. Their ostensible reason for keeping this "propaganda" film off the screens of their cinema houses: running 28 minutes, it is too long for a newsreel, too short for a feature.

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