Old Land, New World
In 1934, King Vidor was looking for James Murray to cast him in his latest film Our Daily Bread, as a kind of follow-up to the character Murray portrayed in the (now legendary) silent The Crowd. In the six years since that picture, Murray was fully consumed by alcoholism and turned to panhandling on Skid Row, where Vidor found him. “Just because I stop you on the street and try to borrow a buck you think you can tell me what to do,” Murray reportedly told Vidor. The downward mobility of the city in The Crowd seemed to strike Murray even harder than his character, John Sims, given that at least John had Mary (Eleanor Boardman) by his side, and the two could laugh off their tragedy by the end of the story. To Vidor, there’s something salvatory in the social. And if the city’s a place where men get beaten down, then nature is where they get built up.
Our Daily Bread sees John and Mary Sims (recast as Tom Keene and Karen Morley, respectively) heading to the country and posting up at an abandoned farm. They don’t really know what to do there, besides John remembering how to make beds out of pine branches from his Scout days. John’s naive, but not so much so that he thinks he can start the farm on his and Mary’s own. He aspires to build something with his hands, and knows he needs help. So begins a project of utopian aspirations, and they post signs looking for hands. A flood of men arrive to work, and John is mostly disappointed with the crop. “What can you do?” he asks one of the men. “High-class pants pressing.” “This is a farm, not a hotel!” He’s more interested in the plumbers, the carpenters—the blue-collar workers, not the unemployed salesmen and violinists, but everyone makes their case nonetheless.
The preference in work here is revealing of Vidor’s rather bizarre and conflicting conservative politics: Vidor’s labor forward, but sees more value in those that physically build the world rather than people who engage in bourgeois services. And Vidor doesn’t want viewers to get the wrong idea, so he tries to tell the audience explicitly what the film is not by having the members of the new collective farm sit around and discuss what kind of political entity they’ll be. When a democracy is brought up, people shoot it down as the very thing that got them into the mess they’re in. Someone brings up socialism, and the conversation is cut off—although Vidor makes sure to frame that ideological speaker as saying the “state” will get to control everything, “including the profits.” It’s a classic anti-Bolshevik portrayal of what socialism is, and funnier when considered all the members of Our Daily Bread’s collective still pool all their resources together and expend their labor towards a mutually productive and rewarding goal. Vidor might reject socialism in name, but his offered counterpoint is still socialist in practice.
It’s the exact kind of illogical politics one would expect from a man who was an early advocate for and first president of the Screen Director’s Guild while also a fierce anti-communist who’d go on to be a HUAC collaborator. Some would point towards Vidor’s adaptation of Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead as truly revealing of Vidor’s politics, but that film shows more in what Vidor believes by where he differs from Rand. Rand, as a writer, is focused on the bourgeois—she, like early fascists, rejects their idleness, but believes in an elite amongst them who build great things and shouldn’t be inhibited. Vidor, to an extent, agrees—at least insofar as Howard Roark (Gary Cooper), the practically mythical architect at the center of The Fountainhead, is himself a stand-in for Vidor; Roark’s a man against bowing to the needs of the public “usefulness” of buildings the same way Vidor’s against studios interfering in his art.
The Fountainhead is easier read as a metaphor for filmmaking than it is one of applicable politics, and Vidor’s own editorializing makes Rand’s philosophy even more logically incomprehensible under the microscope. Our Daily Bread goes further to show that the two aren’t kindred conservatives, and John Sims’ farm is no Galt’s Gulch—again, John’s hesitant of anyone not already directly a laborer, whereas Rand’s agrarian utopia in Atlas Shrugged is populated by the most elite people in the world of business, finance, and the arts, who inexplicably have become good at also tending to pigs. An overlong tirade of a novel (while eschewing his radical socialist politics, she still learned many lessons from Chernyshevsky, like: write paper-thin characters, be annoyingly polemical, and have terrible prose), Rand ends Atlas Shrugged with her chosen people returning to a collapsed world as its saviors, their leader writing the holy sign of the dollar in the air as they make their return. Vidor’s Our Daily Bread is a total rejection of that kind of escape, as the purpose of his characters is to never return, but make something new for themselves that wasn’t possible back there (see: Bird of Paradise for another example). Instead, the labor itself is the salvation, as the men of the collective successfully dig an irrigation ditch to divert water for the farm. The film ends in the sudden jubilation of the moment. It can be done, another world is possible. At the very least, it can be in the movies.