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Containing no dialog, with only 700 words of exposition by an unseen commentator, The Plow That Broke the Plains begins with lush, billowy grass, ends with the hulk of a dead tree surrounded by sun-baked desert. What happens between is shown in the arrival of the cattle on the great 400,000,000-acre pasture of the Plains, the inrush of speculators in the wake of the railroads. A homesteader's plow bites into soil held together by the deep roots of prairie grass. Warns a voice: ''Settler, plough at your peril!" A grizzled farmer observes, without comprehending, the first sign of drought. Then comes a Wartime boom in which higher & higher prices are quickly followed by more & more wheat planting until the grass that once bound this country together has given way to endless fields under a parching sun. Finally, to mournful music by Composer Thomson, are shown the ravages of the drifting dust that followed when drought, heat and winds struck the acres that should never have been plowed. From the Dust Bowl in their automobiles, in the summer of 1935, emigrate 30,000 refugees a month to seek whatever jobs they can on the roads leading Westward. Epilog of the film shows how the Resettlement Administration is transplanting 4,500 stranded families to new houses on small farms in ten States.
"Documentary Films" are what the modern cinema calls non-fiction pictures, exclusive of newsreels, travelogs and similar shorts. When made by governments, as most documentary films are, they are usually interlarded with propaganda. Typical were the pictures shown along with The Plow That Broke the Plains in Washington's Mayflower last fortnight: an excerpt from The Triumph of the Will, directed for Adolf Hitler by Leni Riefenstahl (TIME, Feb. 7); an institutional reel called Midi dealing with the French railways; a Russian Harvest Festival which depicts the Ukraine as a merry place; Color Box and The Face of Britain, respectively glorifying the British Post Office and the social effect of water power.
What made The Plow That Broke the Plains news last week, a year after it was begun and weeks after it was completed, was that the Federal Government could find no satisfactory way to distribute it to the country. According to Director Lorentz, Hollywood had been suspiciously noncooperative from the start. Most cinema producers frankly hate the New Deal and are therefore in no mood to handle the distribution of a New Deal film at any price, even if it is as effective and exciting as The Plow That Broke the Plains. Their ostensible reason for keeping this "propaganda" film off the screens of their cinema houses: running 28 minutes, it is too long for a newsreel, too short for a feature.