The Plow That Broke The Plains / The River

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Film Description

Two landmark Depression-era American documentary films from Pare Lorentz, The Plow That Broke The Plains (1935) and The River (1937). Both were made to promote Roosevelt's New Deal as a way of repairing previous devastation to the land and its people - The Great Plains in the case of The Plow, the vast river valley of the Mississippi in the case of The River - and remain strong in their impact today. Both are accompanied by Virgil Thomson's original scores.

Film Information

DVD Extras

Newly re-recorded soundtracks to both films; George Stoney on The Plow and The River; Stoney on The New Deal, The River and Race; Charles Fussell on Virgil Thomson; Virgil Thomson on Virgil Thomson (archive audio); The original ending and beginning to The Plow; Optional original narration.

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Reviews & Articles

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Review by Graeme Hobbs on 1st February 2007

These are landmark American documentary films, made in support of Roosevelt's New Deal programmes of the 1930s, that attempt to humble, but not diminish, a people and its achievements. The Plow is the story of the devastation wreaked on the Great Plains by wheat farming, The River a record of the price paid for the great wealth made possible through the vast reach of the Mississippi. Their images - swaying wheat, cracked earth, wind-blown plains and farmers shovelling dust in The Plow; countless trunks heading to lumber mills, subsequent soil erosion, flooding and poverty among cotton share-croppers in The River, are still stirring today.

Pare Lorentz's script for The River, praised by James Joyce as 'the most beautiful prose I have heard in ten years', was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1938, the same year that The River
was voted best documentary at the Venice Film Festival, ahead of Leni Riefenstahl's Olympia. Virgil Thomson's scores (The River was praised by Aaron Copland as 'a lesson in how to treat Americana') are here revitalised by new re-recordings.

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Article - "Baked-out, blown-out and flooded: The Plow that broke the Plains & The River" by Graeme Hobbs
Wednesday 31st January 2007

The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River are landmark American documentary films, made in support of Roosevelt's New Deal programmes of the 1930s, which aimed at the recovery of the American economy and relief for her people during the Great Depress...  View article in full

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