America Lost and Found
America Lost and Found, featured in Filmex '80 and soon to appear on PBS, documents with carefully researched and rare footage the rise of the mass media in its effort to ward off the nationwide psychological trauma produced by the Depression. FDR signs the New Deal, Shirley Temple leads a parade to boost national morale, Kate Smith sings “God Bless America,” and Eleanor Roosevelt leads a smile contest. But filmmakers Tom Johnson and Lance Bird avoid cliches of other Depression compilation documentaries by juxtaposing interviews with jobless urban drifters taken from suppressed newsreels, stills of starving Americans, footage of strikes and protest riots with, for example, shots of Henry Ford and Thomas Edison on a picnic (“There's no such thing as no chance,” says Ford; “There's no substitute for hard work,” says Edison).

“Catches the contradictions of that decade.... Our popular American culture, groping for identity and direction, is the thrust of the film which has historical authenticity and pain, mutually imbedded with the nostalgia.... (Narrator) Pat Hingle's voice over the visuals guides us,... a voice weathered by the Depression; he plainly once rode the rails and froze in the breadlines.”