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producing company has a special department for them, with four directors. Sweden is beginning to understand the value and importance of the documentary film.
Ragnar Allberg.
AMERICA
The sheen of the surface photography gets slicker, light glances off the edge of polished surfaces like star-bursts, there is a steel-edged sharpness to the black-and-white magic of what a ten-thousand-dollar Mitchell sound camera can do — and ground noises have been eliminated from the sound so that technically one might say that the American movie is flawless.
But one does not say that because the emotional content remains as sterile as ever. One cannot forgive this vacuity of ideas for the devastating sleekness of the mechanics of photography and sound. The critics have sung the praises of Vidor's The Wedding Night, which had the novelty of the Connecticut tobacco fields as a setting but little else. Otherwise it is the old triangle, with a primitive base and a sharp apex lifted by the gargantuan stature of Gary Cooper, a good actor. Anna Sten hasn't done anything in Hollywood to approach her performance in Brothers Karamazov. The last "touch" in The Wedding Night is true Vidor and good Vidor. In Our Daily Bread the intention is more laudable than the execution of it. For one thing, Vidor must have looked too long at Turksib. What good is a social document if you are going to drag in such wellworn dramatic cliches as the tough guy who gives himself up so that the reward money can be used to further the co-operative farm? And why the fuzzy-haired blonde to vamp the husband away from the faithful and serving wife and thereby jeopardize the success of the co-operative by luring away the farm's organizer? A co-operative farm has real problems to meet — they concern Government or State subsidies, united front of workers and farmers, soil, seed, irrigation and the economic system which will or will not allow it to function. What is this nonsense about blondes and mock-heroics? The one fine shot of a little globe of water spurting up from the earth around the tender shoot — as lyrical as Pudovkin at his best — should have shown Vidor the true forte of the film. Yet Our Daily Bread made my companion cry, and was awarded a gold medal by I.C.E. Maybe it doesn't take much (along such a "daring" line of thought, i.e. that the soil is the mother of man, and that man should return to it to reclaim his living and his self-respect) to touch a world sated with artificialities. But the picture is a failure at the boxoffice in America. The mass of people prefer to be numbed with the narcotic of the trivial average Hollywood film. A film like Our Daily
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