Frontier Figures

by Beth E. Levy

  The plot of The Plow is captured accurately enough in the subtitles Thomson included in the full score: Prelude, Pastorale (Grass), Cattle, Homesteader, Warning, War and the Tractor, Blues (Speculation), Drought, and Devastation.38 But to understand the project's epic ambitions, we must turn again to Lorentz, who dropped his critical reserve in order to explain that the film “tells the story of the Plains, and it tells it with some emotional value—an emotion that springs out of the soil itself. Our heroine is the grass, our villain the sun and the wind, our players the actual farmers living in the Plains country. It is a melodrama of nature—the tragedy of turning grass into dust that only Carl Sandburg or Willa Cather perhaps could tell as it should be told.”39

  Rather than celebrating the rancher, the farmer, or even the Resettlement Agency, Lorentz was adamant in considering the grass itself as embattled heroine. Right from the outset, Lorentz's words scroll across the screen to proclaim: “This is a record of land…of soil, rather than people—a story of the great Plains; the 400,000,000 acres of wind-swept grass lands that spread up from the Texas panhandle to Canada…A high, treeless continent, without rivers, without streams…A country of high winds, and sun…and of little rain…[ellipses in the original].” He echoed these themes incessantly in the instructions he sent to Thomson: “The title will be printed over grass—a wash drawing of pioneers going across the horizon.” And later: “Grass will start with dark close-up, grass slightly waving. Will dissolve into a series of panoramic shots with grass waving more and more—will dissolve finally with close shot, grass waving mightily. The dialogue will point out that grass country has high winds and a great deal of sun and no water.” From Thomson he requested “a Peer Gynt pastorale” to evoke “the beginning of the world,” calling to mind both the Garden of Eden and a characteristic silent film cue for rural utopia.40

  In contrast to Lukas Foss's erasure of prairie place names, The Plow describes in detail the geography of the plains. Immediately following the credits, an animated map names and locates the region. Informative though they may be, the prologue and map do not make for gripping cinema. Thomson filled the void with an austere fugato whose intertwining lines (as Lerner suggests) mimic both the animated line-drawing of the map and the interwoven blades of buffalo grass that filled the undisturbed prairie. What follows is not exactly “a Peer Gynt pastorale,” but it serves the purpose. Under the subtitle “Pastorale (Grass),” Thomson indulges in leisurely woodwind counterpoint; the triadic flute melody is treated in spare two-part imitation (example 26). While there are no bagpipe drones or twittering trills, it is easy enough to connect the consonant, contrapuntal un folding with the intricate perfection of untrammeled Nature. It is axiomatic to the film that mankind can only disrupt this harmony.

  EXAMPLE 26. Thomson, The Plow That Broke the Plains, “Pastorale (Grass),” mm. 1-12 (New York: Mercury Music Corp., 1942)

  Thomson's polyphony of grass and Lorentz's insistence on the prairie heroine depersonalize the film in ways that may have aided its distribution but undercut its message. From the beginning, Lorentz and the RA were dogged by completely justifiable charges of propagandizing. The Plow was released during an election year, when FDR's New Deal was embattled by the twin specters of socialism and inefficiency. Hollywood's mistrust of government meddling hampered Lorentz's efforts to acquire stock footage. To make matters worse, his cameramen were avid and very public leftists. According to Lorentz, Paul Strand and Leo Hurwitz went “on strike” in protest of the film's insufficiently anticapitalist stance.41 As Scribner's Magazine told the story, “They wanted it to be all about human greed and how lousy our social system was. And he couldn't see what this had to do with dust storms.”42 Lorentz thus felt beset from the right and the left—no wonder he chose the impassive grass as his heroine.

  Lorentz's elimination of dialogue and professional actors can also be linked to his desire for distance from Hollywood's business as usual. A publicity brochure from the RA clarifies: “Film depicts story of the land with people as background. Land is dramatized; quite the reverse of usual motion-picture technique.”43 According to the Baltimore Sun, “There is more serious drama in this truthful record of the soil than in all the ‘Covered Wagons' and ‘Big Trails' produced by the commercial cinema.” W. L. White told the readers of Scribner's that “voice, music, and pictures made the rape of 400,000,000 acres more moving than the downfall of any Hollywood blonde.”44 These contrasts are pointed, but Lorentz retained his fondness for panoramic landscape shots even in feature films. When called upon to review Nunnally Johnson's adaptation of Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath (1940), he argued that the movie slighted the land itself and that, particularly in passages without action or dialogue, the production “needed a movie director.” This may seem a strange injunction for a film directed by the soon-to-be illustrious John Ford, and Lorentz actually praised Ford as the man “who, by virtue of going to Zion Park [sic] in Utah to photograph his outdoor sequences in Stagecoach, made a Western action picture into a thing of beauty.” In the case of The Grapes of Wrath, however, Lorentz's own vision of the Dust Bowl was obviously still uppermost in his mind. Calling for greater attention to “skies and brown land and, most of all, wind,” Lorentz suggested that the filmmaker “needed only to have written ‘drought' and then left it to the director to re-create the feeling of those dusty plains tilting from Oklahoma clear up to Canada with their miserable huts and busted windmills. In fact, he needed only to have gone to the panhandle of Oklahoma and Texas and western Kansas and the Dakotas and eastern Colorado and said: ‘Photograph this—here is where they came from.'” 45

  PEOPLE ON THE PLAINS

  Although Lorentz clearly drew greater inspiration from the panoramic sweep of the land than from the wind-chiseled features of the plainsmen, his team took some human interest shots that rival the more famous Farm Security photographs of Dorothea Lange. After all, the Study Guide pointed out, “the Great Plains area means life”: “It means Indians, white men, cattle herding, railroads, General Custer, Sitting Bull, Little Big Horn River, the rush into Oklahoma, the lure of free land. An endless wealth of material, the ‘Opening of the West,' perhaps the most romantic, colorful period in American history. Having ‘conquered' the West, man now attempted to ‘conquer' the natural resources he found there.”46

  Among the film's human images are a dusty baby playing on a rusty plow, children braced against the sun or running to escape a dust storm, and above all the Texas farmer Bam White (whom Lorentz paid to plow on camera). According to Literary Digest, the seventy-two-year-old Bam was “a wiry blunt-speaking plainsman, whose life and prophecies curiously matched the tone of the film.” Yet, as a reviewer for Variety pointed out, Bam and his neighbors “aren't called upon for any histrionics other than staring at sky or whittling sticks to indicate complete resignation to fate.”47 Indeed, it is remarkable how often the film obscures the people it aimed to help: cowboys are dwarfed by vast herds and open spaces; farmers are barely visible riding atop their tractors; families are enveloped in dust—their feet more memorable than their faces; Okies are concealed in their sad parade of automobiles.

  It was perhaps inevitable that Thomson's soundtrack would emphasize the human element more frequently than the image track does. According to the Study Guide, Thomson “based his music for THE PLOW on native American cowboy airs and familiar American folk music.” Literary Digest let it be known that “Mr. Thomson went back to the basic plains themes for his music in the picture, and wove in the old cattle and dirt-farmer songs. There is a brief period of authentic war music (as opposed to Tin Pan Alley war music) and each dust-storm scene has a thematic hymn which runs through the picture.” Copland praised Thomson at greater length in a lecture at Columbia University: “You get an earthy and rather American quality by the fact that the music is rather thinly orchestrated, depending mostly on a tune that Thomson either borrowed from some native source or invented in the style of a native folk-tune.”48

  Shor
tly after receiving Lorentz's commission, Thomson took himself to the New York Public Library, where he checked out Sandburg's American Songbag, as well as five other volumes: Cowboy Campfire Ballad, Folk Music of the Western Hemisphere, Lonesome Cowboy, Songs of the Open Range, and Songs of the Saddle. Lerner's detective work, confirmed by materials in Thomson's papers, suggests that he actually took his borrowed western tunes (usually including their key signatures) from Margaret Larkin's collection Singing Cowboy (1931).49 Lorentz had asked Thomson to use some “herding songs.” At one point he had also planned to pepper the otherwise placid narration with a second voice rattling off cattle prices, but in the end the pastoral vision held sway. He described instead the undisturbed “paradise” of the early cattleman, an “uncharted ocean of grass,” telling Thomson, “The grass and cattle sequences run almost four minutes without cues—this is a very long time for panoramic motion pictures and the audience should feel the endless horizon of grass—the vastness of Nature minding its own knitting.”50

  Lorentz envisioned the cowboy operating in a preindustrial Eden, before fences sprouted in the prairie soil, and before the shadow of the slaughterhouse fell upon the cowboy image. Thomson's medley of cowboy tunes seems likewise to float free of these darker undercurrents. A variant of “Old Paint” (or “Houlihan”) enters with a strumming accompaniment that sets the English horn quotation in relief, speaking a gentle 3/4 against the melody's 6/8 meter—instead of loping, it waltzes (example 27). “The Cowboy's Lament” enters over the same comforting oom-pah-pah, but with a syncopated rhythmic profile all its own (Thomson marks it first “Fancy Free” and then “High wide and handsome”). Only with the entry of “Git Along Little Dogies” is the metrical play resolved into a clearly duple meter. All the “herding songs” feature major keys, and all are repeated with changes in scoring that are gently colorful, not distracting.

  Figure 6. The Grasslands, film still from The Plow That Broke the Plains. Courtesy of the George Eastman House

  As if taking to heart the processes outlined by Frederick Jackson Turner in his famous frontier thesis, the homesteader succeeds the cowboy on screen as the narrator proclaims: “The railroad brought the world into the plains…new populations, new needs crowded the last frontier. Once again the plowman followed the herds and the pioneer came to the plains. Make way for the plowman!” In true Turnerian fashion, the Study Guide notes: “People moved into the dry Western Plains slowly. During the latter part of the nineteenth century cowboys and stockmen invaded the plains and helped drive out the Indians…. the cowboys drove these herds northward across the plains, which at that time were crossed by no fences and cut up by no farms…. Gradually, however, the pressure for more free land grew in the east, and farmers, rather than stockmen, began to push into the plains region.”51 Hollywood footage shows covered wagons jolting into action for a land run, right in line with the familiar equation of westward expansion and the progress of civilization. The Study Guide called this episode “part of the great sweep of empire…a spectacular race of covered wagons into territory just being opened by the Federal Government.” Yet Lorentz's frontier thesis takes its meteorology far more seriously than Turner's did: “High winds and sun…/ a country without rivers and with little rain. / Settler, plow at your peril!” The settler may be more “civilized,” but the cowboy represents a “higher” stage in the natural history of the plains, a better symbiosis between man and nature.

  EXAMPLE 27. Thomson, The Plough That Broke the Plains, “Cowboy Songs,” (“Houlihan,” “Laredo,” and “Git along, little dogies”) mm. 1-12

  In contrast to the leisurely insouciance of Thomson's cowboy songs, the homesteader's good cheer is short-lived and interrupted by moments of foreboding. A distorted fanfare (not unlike those in Sowerby's Prairie) announces a change of scene after the cattle are herded into pens and the screen melts into footage of an approaching wagon train. The jangling strains of “Walking John” and “Idyho” last a mere thirty seconds while the covered wagons lurch across the screen like children's toys. The pioneers themselves are largely hidden from view, and their progress seems giddy, colored with strumming banjo, woodblock, the toy timbres of xylophone and piccolo, and whirling wagon-wheel figurations in the winds and brass. The hammering of the first fence post into hard ground brings the music to a halt, as Lorentz had requested: “The entire sequence is one of great exuberance except for the definite dramatization of the first plow—at which moment the music should pause—introduce the warning of ‘plow at your peril' and should continue warning…the plow is the villain.”52 When the homesteader's music resumes, it is uncannily mechanical. Celesta and glissandi in strings and brass mirror the reapers, whirling out of balance with the rhythms of nature. Whether villainous (in Lorentz's eyes) or heroic (as Willa Cather described it in My Ántonia), the plow magnified man's impact on the land.

  TRACTORS, TANKS, AND ALL THAT JAZZ

  In a move that would have pleased Leo Marx, the “Homesteader” sequence of The Plow ends with the smoke of a passing locomotive slicing across the screen—a visual parallel to the action of the plow on the grasslands. The machine has entered the garden, and it rides roughshod over the middle landscape while a ratchet sound gradually emerges from the background music. The plow and railroad tipped the balance from fruitful progress toward degrading industrialization. In the argument of the film, however, the real point of no return was reached in the 1910s-20s, with the dovetailing of two related corruptions: wartime overproduction and rampant speculation.

  Given Thomson's thwarted attempt to fight for the Allies during World War I, he must have taken some delight in what the Study Guide called “one of the most exciting sequences ever put on the screen,” “War and the Tractor.” In fact, the Study Guide seems to have shared Thomson's romantic idealizing of the Great War: “Tractors move in fateful procession over the hill. Tanks on the battlefield rush toward the camera…a parade of soldiers passes down the avenue as crowds shout before the flag-bedecked buildings. It's war! War with all its fervor and excitement and restlessness.”53 Lorentz himself was only slightly more circumspect: “The first time the mass tanks come over hill we are in the middle of our own war frenzy—‘Win the War with Wheat'—‘plant that vacant lot'—newspaper headlines—grain boats and guns in a dissolve sequence which leads finally, into another appearance of the tractors over the hill, which builds to a gigantic roar of machinery and guns and fades into the final victorious parade of bayonets and tractor blades.”54 Instead of beating swords into plowshares, the film turns plowshares themselves into weapons.

  Lorentz's cross-cutting of tractors and tanks is justly famous, and many have linked it to the documentary work of Eisenstein and other Soviet filmmakers.55This was the most expensive sequence in The Plow, as the director himself had to hire a squad of farmers to drive their tractors in military formation.56 It also provides perhaps the clearest support for Thomson's contention that Lorentz recut some film sequences to fit his music. Though solo snare drum and assorted bugle calls serve as the only musical background for explosions, screaming headlines, and the like, other film cuts correspond to the regular phrases of the tunes that Thomson borrowed: “Buffalo Skinners,” “Mademoiselle from Armentieres,” and “Brown Eyed Lee.” Military and musical cadences coincide. If “Mademoiselle” with her “Hinky-dinky parlez-vous” conjures up images of doughboys soldiering, the other two songs bring us back to the film's real battleground: the plains.

  Thomson liked to discount folk song texts as irrelevant to his decisions about film scoring—even going so far as to suggest that he selected the tune “Mississippi” to underscore flood scenes in The River for solely musical reasons.57 His claim holds water for “Brown Eyed Lee.” Here, martial dotted rhythms and an opening melody that rockets up through the major triad seem to provide some musical common ground between the cowboy and the soldier. But comparing “Buffalo Skinners” with the western songs that appear in the “Cattle” sequences suggests at least some under
lying consciousness of the text.58 The “herding songs” that accompany the cowboy as he rides into the unspoiled prairie are either cheerful (“Git Along Little Dogies”), adventurous (“The Cowboy's Lament”), or evocative of the close cooperation between men and animals (“Old Paint”). By contrast, the Buffalo Skinner is a worker under contract, railing against his ill treatment by a dishonest employer. It is the boss whose bones are left to bleach in the prairie sun while the cowboys escape from wretched exploitation: “Go home to our wives and sweethearts, tell others not to go, / For God's forsaken the buffalo range and the damned old buffalo.”59 The moment one considers the cowboy as just one cog in the larger industrial spinning out of capital versus labor, the romance of his gritty loneliness evaporates. The text of “Buffalo Skinners” offers a similar substitution of realism for romance.

  For Lorentz and other New Dealers, the ultimate fall from grace—the mother of all WPA projects—was the stock market crash of 1929. The salience of this event may be the best explanation for the prominence in The Plow of the film sequence Lorentz first called “The Brokers and the Grasslands” and later titled “Speculation.” No one doubts that land speculators were a key factor in transforming America's bread basket into a Dust Bowl, but The Plow also implicates the excesses of the so-called jazz age more generally: a ticker tape machine spouts a frantic stream of stock receipts until it crashes (literally) to the floor; glimpses of a black drummer pounding out “hot” jazz mark the climax of the scene.