Our Daily Bread

King Vidor's "The Crowd" (1928) ended hopefully: James Murray and Eleanor Boardman (then playing John and Mary Sims) conquered the industrialized, impersonal City, with a new job and child replacing previous losses. But, the Sims' luck is, according to this film,... Full review

OUR DAILY BREAD is an interesting curio--a historical oddity--but nothing more. I was really surprised when I saw that it currently has a very respectable IMDb score of 7.1 despite being a rather silly and difficult to watch film. The film... Full review

Boy, is this film interpreted differently, depending on which critic is discussing it. Overall, however, most of them - including me - like this movie and find it interesting.Today's critics like to use this film as a boost for socialistic... Full review

Politically, this is one of those movies (like High Noon, for instance) that you can read any way you like. When the farmers - the males, anyway; the women don't seem to have much to do except make coffee -... Full review

The film, though socialistic in many ways, represents the drive to get back to nature as stressed by FDR. It represents the optimism believed by people that the current system had gotten too complex and that people were mere cogs.... Full review

At the time of this film's release, it was a pure novelty. Hollywood had paid little attention to the people in rural areas who had to deal with the Depression. The fact that this movie was made at all is... Full review

"Our Daily Bread" (United Artists, 1934), directed by King Vidor, is a follow-up/sequel to Vidor's own 1928 silent drama, "The Crowd" (MGM, 1928) starring James Murray and Eleanor Boardman as the typical American couple, John and Mary Sims. In this... Full review

Ponderous, though well-meaning, socialist propaganda piece. Features lots of "let's all get together and form a collective!" speechifying, creaky romantic complications, and wooden characterizations by non-professionals acting very self-consciously (the "pros" aren't any better). However, in the final section of... Full review

Tom Keene does a marvelous job as an everyman during the depression era. This King Vidor classic of a group of poor drifters who try to make a go of a farm is timeless in its universality. Barbara Pepper (much... Full review

Desperate people set in desperate Great Depression times try to eke out a living on an abandoned farm. Rousing for its "back to the land" pioneering spirit of people from all walks of life forced to help each other start... Full review

a project which consumes the film's final two reels, and which turns out to be one of the finest and most thrilling sequences....The acting by Tom Keene and Barbara Pepper is atrocious....The optimistic finale, distinguished by its Eisentein-like "rhythmic" editing, fortunately lingers in the memory far longer than the film's dramatic and structural defects.....Our Daily Bread is also enhanced by Alfred Newman 's stirring musical score, later borrowed by Darryl F. Zanuck for his production of Les Miserables ... Full Review