World Film and Television Progress (1938)

Sensational American Documentary 'The River' reviewed a well-ordered natural sequence of events that never suffers from the defect of developing side issues. It has been said that a great deal of money was spent on the film and it is that which produced its polish, but one only criticises a result, and there have been comparable British documentary films that have not approached the smoothness of The River. Perhaps its most important quality, when all discussion of technical and informational virtues is finished, is its box office. One exhibitor who saw the film, and who has often expressed the opinion that British documentary is too difficult for ordinary cinemas, said that he would willingly show The River. That, in the long run, is the test that all documentary films must pass. Will the ordinary cinema exhibitor book it? The River is eminently bookable. Its defects come from two things; firstly from its impressionistic style, and secondly from the fact that it is reporting a State enterprise. Although its impressionism is brilliantly carried out, the film's pyrotechnics tend to obscure the information that it is presenting. Because it is reporting a State enterprise that ignores the individual, the film is cold. It overlooks the individual men who man the dykes, the men who load the cotton and the men who crop the cotton fields. In the film men are only cogs in the wheel of a piece of State machinery. Even in showing the operations of individual enterprise only the mass effect is considered. Were there more personal feeling for human beings in the film, the problem and its solution might Pare Lorentz' s documentary ' The River' (Farm Security Administration). have communicated itself more deeply to the audience. It has the fault of all impressionistic technique — the shallow thinking, the lack of intimacy and the delight in film craft. However, on the whole, it is a film to stir the imagination. It brings a new facet of the American scene to British audiences and, in so doing, it helps to play a part in that much to be desired end — a common understanding between the two great democracies of America and Britain. It seems that it is only through the medium of such films from America and through British documentary films that both nations obtain a realisation of their individual problems and their common interests. David Thompson. The Administration seems to be very successful with the movies it makes. The River is its latest contribution to the art of the cinema, a picture which perhaps exceeds in beauty and force that earlier effort, beautiful and forceful too, which was known to us as The Plow That Broke the Plains. For both films the government has employed practically the same talent, and has shown itself in so doing as discreet and discriminating as some of the electorate feel it is in everything it handles. Pare Lorentz directed both, and wrote the text for them; Virgil Thomson composed the score in each case, and in both Thomas Chalmers, once of the Metropolitan, recited the Lorentz narrative. You can see that there is nothing amateurish or casual about the Administration's interest in the movies. The result testifies to all this care and ability. One's only complaint can be that the picture is too brief, a phenomenal objection in this bustling world, and that the half-hour it runs seems to pass in a jiffy. So swift is the pace and so comprehensive the material that one may feel the effect of the film to be almost brusque. The river of The River is the Mississippi, with its tributaries, its creeks and brooks, which spread out across two-thirds of the continent. The Lorentz objective, and the Administration's, has been to instruct us in the story of this river and its valley, the story of the soil impoverished first by cottongrowers and then by the Civil War, of the floods and famine that have ensued, and of the efforts for recovery now being made. It*s a tremendous summary, which takes us from the spruce and pine of the Alleghenies to the mud of the delta ; it reports upon the sharecroppers in the Deep South, the ruins of the houses of Natchez, the floods of Louisville and Cincinnati, and the new dams in Tennessee. To have covered so much mileage, to have demonstrated how a century's activities have worked upon the land, to have made so much material lucid in a half-hour, has required a laboratory exactitude which has been entirely successful. The argument is economic, but it happens to be of pictorial magnificence, which these cameramen have appreciated to the full, just as Mr. Lorentz doubtless realised that a simple listing of the names of rivers, ranges, and towns gave his text a swing and gusto almost poetic. John Mosher, The New Yorker 119