Vidor took the story to MGM for financing and was rejected by that studio. This should hardly have been a surprise to him, since conservative MGM was not exactly receptive to Roosevelt's New Deal program
Raising money and investing some of his own, King Vidor filmed his story on a modest budget. He brought back his everyman characters from The Crowd, John and Mary Sims. He hired some top professionals like composer Alfred Newman to score the film and Joseph Mankiewicz to write the screenplay. The result was a disappointment, a poorly acted and written film with lame story telling and underdeveloped characters mouthing vaguely socialist sentiments.
Vidor seemed to be in love with the ideas of the farm collective. Unfortunately he failed to make the story interesting to the viewer. It's all here, the evil bankers the mean sheriff, the ridiculous good ethnic stereotypes, a man being pursued by an unfeeling legal system etc. The viewer also gets lots of scenes with the members of the commune tilling the fields which doesn't make for exciting cinema. Vidor even put in an "oh come on" blond bombshell character as a temptation to our socialist hero John Sims to leave the commune. Even with a short running time the film was an
effort to sit through.
Only towards the end of the film does King Vidor the filmmaker finally show up. He stages an exciting scene where the commune must save the crops by putting in an irrigation system.
What was so irritating about this film was the failure of the talent involved in to make an interesting film with some emotional content to involve the audience. Instead what we got was a bunch of mealy mouthed socialist garbage.
Written by King Vidor, Elizabeth Hill and Joseph L. Mankiewicz, the running time is 80 minutes.
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