Download The Plow That Broke the Plains

“The Plow That Broke the Plains”
This is a short documentary film which shows what happened to the
Great Plains region of the United States and Canada when uncontrolled
agricultural farming led to the Dust Bowl. It was written and directed
by Pare Lorentz.
Lorentz worked on the film with composer Virgil Thomson, who shared
Lorentz’s enthusiasm for folk music and incorporated many folk
melodies by the American baritone, Thomas Hardie Chalmers.
The film was sponsored by the United States government (resettlement
Administration) to raise awareness about the New Deal and was
intended to cost $6,000 or less; it eventually cost over $19,000 and
Lorentz, turning in many receipts written on various scraps of paper,
had many of his reimbursements denied and paid for much of the film
himself. Lorentz later faced criticism for appearing to blame westward
bound settlers for the ecological crisis by having eroded the soil of the
Plains with unrestrained farming (and one of his photographers, Arthur
Rothstein, was criticized for moving a skull from one location to another
in the Dust Bowl to shoot it and for other stagings in the film), but the
film nonetheless succeeded in driving home the message of the severity
of the problem caused by the misuse of land.
Virgil Thomson compiled a concert suite from his original score, which
has been performed and recorded. One of the earliest recordings was
for Vanguard Records with Leopold Stokowski conducting the
Symphony of the Air; the original stereo LP also included a suite from
Thomson’s score for another Lorentz documentary, The River.
In 1999, The Plow That Broke the Plains was selected for preservation
in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress
as being, “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.”
(Date entered public domain: June 16, 1964)