{"id":38665,"date":"2023-01-27T19:20:03","date_gmt":"2023-01-28T00:20:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=38665"},"modified":"2023-01-27T19:26:04","modified_gmt":"2023-01-28T00:26:04","slug":"the-bootleg-files-the-river","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2023\/01\/27\/the-bootleg-files-the-river\/","title":{"rendered":"The Bootleg Files: The River"},"content":{"rendered":"

BOOTLEG FILES 826:<\/strong> \u201cThe River\u201d (1937 documentary produced by FDR\u2019s Farm Security Administration). <\/p>\n

LAST SEEN:<\/strong> On various Internet sites.<\/p>\n

AMERICAN HOME VIDEO:<\/strong> In collections of public domain documentaries.<\/p>\n

REASON FOR BOOTLEG STATUS:<\/strong> A lapsed copyright.
\n
\nCHANCES OF SEEING A COMMERCIAL DVD RELEASE:<\/strong> A 4K restored version would be wonderful.<\/p>\n

In 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt\u2019s New Deal policies brought forth the Resettlement Administration, a federal agency designed to assist the nation\u2019s financially struggling rural communities. By this point in the Roosevelt presidency, there were a growing number of critics who argued the New Deal programs were using taxpayer funds to finance lofty socialist endeavors.
\n<\/p>\n

The Resettlement Administration\u2019s leadership realized that it needed to communicate directly with the American public regarding its goals and the strategies it hoped to pursue to achieve positive results. This agency took the unprecedented step of embarking on a mass media outreach campaign that encompassed a Photography Project that documented the depth and scope of rural poverty and a Film Project to produce documentaries highlighting the agency\u2019s work.<\/p>\n

While the Photography Project created thousands of memorable photographs created by a battalion of gifted visual artists including Dorothea Lange, Gordon Parks and Walker Evans, the Film Project\u2019s output was limited to only two films, both directed by Pare Lorentz. The first, \u201cThe Plow That Broke the Plains\u201d (1936), offered a vivid depiction of the Dust Bowl and the work of the Resettlement Administration plus other New Deal agencies including the Civilian Conservation Corps, the Forest Service and the Soil Conversation Service.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe Plow That Broke the Plains\u201d created considerable controversy \u2013 Lorentz went far over his budget and needed to pay out-of-pocket to cover his overspending, while FDR\u2019s detractors in Washington and Hollywood complained about the federal government producing propaganda films. But this production also received praise for its bold and artistic presentation of a harrowing issue, and FDR was impressed enough with Lorentz\u2019s work to give him the go-ahead for another film related to the Resettlement Administration\u2019s work to aid communities destroyed by Mississippi River flooding.<\/p>\n

The resulting film, \u201cThe River,\u201d brilliantly displayed the virtues and vices of Lorentz\u2019s filmmaking. To its credit, Lorentz surrounded himself with four ace cinematographers \u2013 Oscar-winner Floyd Crosby, Willard Van Dyke and the brothers Stacy and Horace Woodard \u2013 and composer Virgil Thomson, who scored \u201cThe Plow That Broke the Plains.\u201d The film also captured the tragedy of the January 1937 flooding along the Mississippi that reinforced the message of the need for a serious plan to save river-based communities from the worst of nature.<\/p>\n

The film also effectively encapsulates the primary cause of the excessive flooding: a century\u2019s worth of soil erosion, from the pre-Civil War exhaustion of cotton fields soil to excessive deforestation in the post-Civil War industrialization of urban centers along the river. The film is also daring in showing the poverty of the Southern tenant farmers living in near servitude during this era, along with the stark prediction that their children will be doomed to a life of disease and poverty unless change occurs.<\/p>\n

But Lorentz also veered into the artsy when he was trying to be artistic. Consider this blank verse he composed as narration to describe the multiple tributaries feeding into Mississippi River:<\/p>\n

From as far East as New York,
\nDown from the turkey ridges of the Alleghenies
\nDown from Minnesota, twenty-five hundred miles,
\nThe Mississippi River runs to the Gulf.<\/p>\n

Carrying every drop of water, that flows down
\ntwo-thirds the continent.
\nCarrying every brook and rill, rivulet and creek,
\nCarrying all the rivers that run down two-thirds
\nthe continent,
\nThe Mississippi runs to the Gulf of Mexico.<\/em><\/p>\n

This style of writing, narrated by the slightly hammy opera singer Thomas Hardie Chalmers, sets up \u201cThe River\u201d as a work of aesthetic pretension rather than a documentary about a life-and-death matter. It also doesn\u2019t help that \u201cThe River\u201d stops cold for a brief segment where Robert E. Lee\u2019s praise for the Confederate Army in his 1865 surrender statement rolls across the screen \u2013 perhaps this was shoehorned into the film to soften the brittle sensibilities of Dixiecrat viewers following earlier footage of hard-working Black laborers in the cotton fields and the fields. <\/p>\n

Lorentz also waited for the final few minutes of the film to remind the viewers that the New Deal agencies are coming to the rescue to save the river-based communities by planting new forests, creating a village for tenant farmers to become mortgage debt-carrying homesteaders, and building hydroelectric dams. The film\u2019s sign-off message is too obvious: Since the individual farmer and the private sector cannot fix things, the Wizard of Hyde Park and his bureaucrats can come to the rescue.<\/p>\n

Roosevelt loved \u201cThe River\u201d and Lorentz was eager to get the film seen by as many people as possible. He took it upon himself to self-distribute the film on a platform release, opening it in New Orleans in October 1937 before taking it to Washington, D.C., two months later and then to New York City two months after that, where Frank S. Nugent of the New York Times called it \u201cone of the finest films ever made.\u201d<\/p>\n

Although some conservative critics repeated their propaganda snipes at Lorentz\u2019s work and, amazingly, Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace faulted the film for not showing corn crops in his native Iowa, \u201cThe River\u201d was more popular with audiences than \u201cThe Plow That Broke the Plains.\u201d Paramount Pictures shattered a precedent by offering to distribute \u201cThe River\u201d for free to theaters \u2013 exhibitors only had to pay for the shipping costs of the prints \u2013 and, thus, Lorentz\u2019s half-hour documentary enjoyed a nationwide theatrical release. In 1938, \u201cThe River\u201d also won the documentary award at Mussolini\u2019s inaugural Venice Film Festival, beating Leni Riefensthal\u2019s \u201cOlympia\u201d for the prize.<\/p>\n

As a film produced by the federal government, \u201cThe River\u201d was not covered by copyright. As a result, there are endless dupes of the film floating around on public domain labels and online video sites. Many of these copies are not visually pristine and some are defaced with time codes. This might be one of the cleanest copies you can find online: <\/p>\n