King Vidor's classic is presented in a restored, 35mm nitrate print, with a prologue comprised of Depression-era newsreel footage; a King Vidor interview; and excerpts from the documentary, A New Frontier, which describes the formation of the collective farm on which Vidor based the farm in Our Daily Bread.
Our Daily Bread was one of King Vidor's most personal films, one which he financed by himself when banks refused to back a film that advocated cooperative farming as the way toward economic stability for a nation in despair. To emphasize his point, Vidor took his city couple from The Crowd (1928), John and Mary Sims (played by Tom Keene and Karen Morley), still jobless and without food or rent money, and presented them with the chance to become farmers. Unable to make a go of it alone, they join with migrant farm workers and all together defeat problems through their own ingenuity. The classic sequence in this film--one which ranks with the best of Eisenstein or Griffith--is the superhuman effort to dig an irrigation ditch to ward off a drought; timed by Vidor with a metronome, and filmed with the most skillful camerawork, it is set to no other music than the sounds of picks and shovels, until music and water break through simultaneously. Our Daily Bread has been seen as naive in its approach to the Depression, and perhaps Vidor's vision of the average American is made of the same simple faith that he portrays in his characters. But, as historian William K. Everson notes, “Our Daily Bread was one of the very few films of the Depression years to take a theme of social comment and not camouflage it within a framework of melodrama....”