Frontier Figures
Page 25
The union of land speculation with other symbols of the “roaring twenties” was in large part Lorentz's work. This episode relies heavily on the stock footage that he obtained after his cameramen were effectively out of the picture. Because of the enmity that had grown up between Lorentz and the Hollywood studios, he had only a limited number of reels at his disposal. Nevertheless, the frenzied jazz drummer remains a striking choice. Jazz had been part of Lorentz's imaginary soundtrack for this scene from the very beginning. One of his initial memos to Thomson reads: “Music should start with high clarinet—opening of Bugle Call Rag or St. Louis Blues is jazz feeling I have in mind—and go into jazz sequence—even if it does seem hackneyed lets [sic] see how it sounds.”60 Again Thomson wrote more or less to order, even adding “Blues” to Lorentz's scene title. A high clarinet lick saunters in over a softly throbbing rhythm section consisting of tom-tom, wood block, cymbal, and low strings (example 28). Muted trumpet sighs its response before English horn answers the clarinet's call and alto saxophone enters with a more rhythmically elaborate line reminiscent of Dixieland.
Although the instrumentation of this passage is absolutely in keeping with the generic associations Lorentz desired, it also functions in context as a corruption, even a perversion of the bass ostinati and pastoral upper woodwinds of happier days. Though it is prefaced by a distorted fanfare signaling that all is not well, the music seen in example 28 first underscores images of waving grass almost identical to those of the earlier Pastorale. Some time elapses before the dissonance between music and image begins to resolve in a shared crescendo of activity: printed bills of sale are churned out almost “in time” to the clockwork of the rhythm section. At rehearsal number 24, high saxophone and wah-wah muted trumpet enter out of kilter with their surroundings, gradually increasing in volume only to drop again to a stage whisper. The push to a real climax does not begin until rehearsal number 30, where “brassy” sforzandos fasten onto the syncopated rhythm—a dotted-eighth note followed by an eighth note tied to a half note—that both Lorentz and Thomson identified with the Charleston. The Charleston rhythm coalesces underneath footage of night harvesting—more evidence that the farmer now operates out of sync with the natural order of things. At a preliminary stage, Thomson linked the Charleston with the first appearance of the on-screen jazzman; his sketches labeled this passage “Jazz Menace.” But in the film itself the drummer's memorable visage does not enter until the final ten seconds of the three-minute scene. Despite this long period of jazzy preparation, his appearance still has a certain shock value. He is the grinning stunt double for the invisible land speculator.
EXAMPLE 28. Thomson, The Plough That Broke the Plains, “Blues,” mm. 1-12
Like the rest of the film, “War and the Tractor” and “Blues (Speculation)” show Lorentz's deep involvement in shaping the musical profile of The Plow. The composer's prerogative emerges not at the level of borrowed tunes but in matters of musical texture and structure. In Thomson's hands, the musical-industrial complex of war and jazz represented a distinctly different kind of danger than droughts or dust storms. While the results of these meteorological threats were exacerbated by human activity, they were in essence natural, cyclical, and recurring. Thomson chose for them circular melodies and contrapuntal action related to that of the original “Pastorale (Grass).” By contrast, the music of soldiers, brokers, and jazzmen grows by accretion and crescendo. As the film's mechanical threats are cumulative and irreversible, they can only end in military explosion or economic implosion.
PLOW AT YOUR PERIL
The rapid intercutting of the “Negro drummer” and plummeting ticker tape machine is followed by an even starker juxtaposition: the bleaching bones of dead cattle against a background of parched earth. In Lorentz's explication, “the final crash is leading into complete inactivity and sterility. What I mean is, the end of this sequence is the end of the world.”61 With the exhaustion of the fertile grasslands we have reached the antithesis of pastoral fecundity. At this moment, before we ever see the migrating Okies, the film has reached its denouement. Edwin Denby, writing for Modern Music, indicted The Plow for exactly this reason:
The trouble is that the weight of the film—the most space, best build, heaviest shots—center around the exploitation of the land that collapsed with the crash of ’29. The boom is the big thing pictorially. When the drought comes, the most thrilling pictures are over…. This misproportion has made the film longwinded and confused. Worse than that it has turned the story into a nostalgic fairytale of boom times, evading the real issue: Fellow citizens in misery, what can we do for them. Unfortunately, the Plow is smug.62
When Denby saw The Plow in 1936, it had a three-minute epilogue lauding the RA. By 1939, when the film was withdrawn from circulation by the Farm Security Administration, this epilogue had been removed. From an artistic standpoint, no one was sorry to see it go. Its animation and camerawork were painfully clumsy. Denby considered it “tacked on the end”; Scribner's compared it to the Hollywood “happy endings” that Lorentz claimed to detest; and many other reviewers singled it out for critique.63 As an artifact of propaganda, however, The Plow is seriously crippled by the excision of its only direct references to the New Deal. Only in the epilogue was the RA mentioned by name (along with the Soil Conservation Service, the Civilian Conservation Corps, and the Forest Service).64Only here did the film include images of government programs working to restore the land and to provide relief for farmers. Film critic Frank Nugent (also a favorite screenplay writer for John Ford) raised an unusual note of praise for the epilogue in his New York Times review: “It contains a few short glimpses of the model homesteads on workable land in which some of the drought-stricken farmers and their families have been resettled. The epilogue might have been arrant flag-waving. But it is not.”65 For many others, however, “model homesteads,” cooperative grazing associations, and Soil Conservation Districts smacked of socialism.
Lorentz's description of the epilogue shows his intent to balance the machinery of destruction with the machinery of modern, sustainable agriculture: “Short flashes of house-building: tree-planting; sod-stripping and, finally, huge machine on plains re-seeding barren land will go off in distance, fading into dark, windy, close-up of grass—or dead tree at sunset.”66 With or without its modest epilogue, The Plow quickly seemed too bleak for government work. A report to the House Appropriations Subcommittee in December 1939 stated: “Because they feel that the conditions have changed for the better since the picture was shot, the areas concerned want their story brought up to date. New maps, animations, and titles will be made when money is available.”67 Planned revisions fell victim to short attention spans and shorter budgets, leaving the scenes of “Drought” and “Devastation” to linger instead in the mind's eye.
Thematically and structurally, these closing scenes recall or reverse the film's Arcadian opening. “Drought” echoes the material of “Grass (Pastorale),” now in a minor key, before trailing into reminiscence motives both textual (“a land of little rain”) and musical—from “Blues (Speculation)” and the “Prelude.” And after the dust storm itself, the final sequence, “Devastation,” returns to the music of the “Prelude,” adding a tango-inspired coda to take the Okie migrants into California. As a negative counterpart to the lively, waving grasses of the “Pastorale,” Lorentz conceived the drought sequence as a “slow march of feet in sand…. They are supposed to represent 7,000,000 farmers, the Democratic party and motherlove.” Thomson's sketching marginalia indicate that he latched on to Lorentz's plan to alternate dusty boots and newspaper headlines ticking off the drought years of the early 1930s.68 In the film, the footsteps appear only briefly, yet their steady trudging, together with the reminiscences in the underscoring, highlights the passage of time.
Shots of windmills, dust devils, and the worried face of a farmer return us to the present moment just in time for the dust storm, which is relatively short-lived on screen (just over two minutes)
and mostly characterized by a dissonant anti-phony of open-fifth alarm calls, racing trills answered by heart-thumping chords, and mimetic scurrying figures that move in and out of sync with shots of horses, men, and children running for cover. In keeping with Lorentz's emphasis on the land as protagonist, the dust gets more screen time than the Okies do. Reviewers were particularly struck by the dust-choked homes: dust drifting against doorways, dust filtering in through the cracks of closed windows, dust filling up an empty fireplace. The RA expected all those watching The Plow to understand this “black blizzard” as a current event—the film footage was almost as up-to-date as a newsreel. “Most of the people in the United States are aware that something is wrong in the Great Plains,” the Study Guide observed in 1938: “Perhaps they still remember the days in 1935 when yellow clouds of dust from the area just east of the Rocky Mountains palled the sky all the way to the Atlantic Coast…. Newspapers have shown them farmers praying for rain, buildings and fences buried in drifted soil, and the ragged bands of refugees who streamed westward from the burned-out farmlands of the plains during the drouth years of 1934 to 1936.”69
As Lorentz saw it, the limited budget and “skeleton staff” of The Plow made it impossible to do justice to the Dust Bowl tragedy: “You will not see the full horror of the dust storms,” he wrote, “a horror that drove men to kill their cattle because they could not stand their ceaseless bellowing, the horror of children choking and dying of dust pneumonia.”70 Nevertheless some legislators from the afflicted areas protested mightily. According to one congressman, The Plow was so insensitive to the accomplishments of his fellow South Dakotans that it “would make his state Republican forever.” Representative Eugene Worley from Oklahoma, himself a Democrat, threatened to punch the head of the RA, calling the film “a libel on the greatest section of the United States” and complaining that “the cameraman selected isolated spots.”71 But another resident of the Texas Panhandle, Mrs. R. L. Duke, weighed in with words of gratitude:
The only criticism I could offer was that you did not have the worst things that happened out here; people dying from dust pneumonia, cows being shot and BLACK dusters. What I want to say about this picture is this: you told the truth and a lot of Chambers of Commerce flew up in the air…. I have lived in this country since 1900. I have seen my country go from the country of Parkman's Oregon Trail to sand dunes. I have seen this country in the happy time 1900-1914. I am afraid I will never see it again in the happy time.72
In her closing words, Mrs. Duke identified the narrative crux of The Plow. Return to the “happy time” was impossible. If the intrepid plainswoman read her Parkman in one of its later editions, she would have known that the historian considered his 1846 “tour of curiosity and amusement” to be itself a relic of times gone by. In 1892, for an edition illustrated by Frederic Remington, he admitted, “He who feared neither bear, Indian, nor devil, the all-daring and all-enduring trapper, belongs to the past, or lives only in a few gray-bearded survivals. In his stead we have the cowboy, and even his star begins to wane.”73 What, then, lay in store for the plains? And for its people?
In light of such questions, the film's final image seems deliberately ambiguous: the silhouette of a bird's nest in a dead tree. Artfully mirrored by a tenuous major (“Picardy”) third in Thomson's underscoring, the empty nest suggests a desolation that still hints at new life.74 Particularly after the omission of the epilogue, however, this symbolism seems hollow in comparison to the havoc wrought by the dust storm. The film presents no viable future for the plains—no return to the prairie past and only one escape from the present Dust Bowl: further, desperate westward migration.
PILGRIMS AND PIONEERS
As hearth and home are abandoned in The Plow, the hymn “Old Hundred” is also undone, set in a melancholy minor mode to the wavering breath of a feeble harmonium. It would appear that Lorentz's suggestion to include the venerable doxology actually sprang from the ironic potential it held for this sequence of desolation, not from its appropriateness to a vision of the early, fertile prairie. While there is no mention of hymnody in his instructions for the opening sequences, he wrote of the dust storm: “While I originally had a scene to go with it I still would like you to think seriously of introducing organ tones and a few measures of ‘old hundred' or some other hymn—with the church service heard over the wind.”75 Given Thomson's preoccupation with hymn tunes in 1936, it is hardly surprising that he took “Old Hundred” to heart as a crucial symbol in The Plow. (It is perhaps more surprising that Olin Downes identified the tune as “Ein Feste Burg” in his New York Times review.)76 If this salient quotation was first conceived alongside scenes of destruction and then transplanted, along with the ominous timpani ostinato, to the unspoiled prairie of the prelude, then Thomson may be credited with shaping our perception of The Plow in several important ways.
First, the doxology solidifies the film's status as a meditation on the care and keeping of natural resources. Second, because the melody marks sequences devoted to both the virgin prairie and the devastated hearth, it unites the film's human figures across generations, helping underscore its allegorical treatment of people. The Plow is not so much about Bam White, Tom Joad, or the iconic woman captured in Dorothea Lange's Migrant Mother, so much as it is about “the Settler.” Finally, as the only borrowed tune to recur at different points in the film, “Old Hundred” carries some weight in defining precisely who these settlers were: Anglo Protestants akin to those who brought this tune across the Atlantic in the first place. After “clearing the Indian,” they took up the challenge of the Homestead Act, to improve the land and bring it into cultivation. At one point, Lorentz's script actually read “white man, you plow at your peril” instead of “settler, plow at your peril,” but in the end he trusted the pictures to speak for themselves.77
In Thomson's mind, the connection between religiosity and agricultural life seemed natural enough: “Farmers my people were, all of them,” he wrote in his autobiography, “with an occasional offshoot into law, divinity or medicine, rarely into storekeeping, never into banking. Baptists they were too, and staunch ones. I do not know when it got started in Virginia, this business of their being always Baptists.”78 Although the farmers on the plains operated considerably farther west than Thomson's forebears, they are introduced to us as fellow citizens of the country church. How strange, then, that Thomson ushers them offstage to the rhythms of a habañera (example 29). Scholars have puzzled over this choice. Joseph Horowitz, for one, notes that “the final parade of cars, fleeing bankrupt farms, was wickedly coupled with a catchy habanera”—evidence of the film's “blithe eclecticism, its informality and humor.” Lerner considers it one of many “typically modernist ironies…subverting traditionally highbrow and lowbrow forms.”79 Perhaps the rhythmic motto here functions as a sign of exhaustion or fatalism; buffeted by ill winds, the embattled farmers pack up and depart in a line of automobiles that was choreographed for the film crew with the help of Dorothea Lange.80
EXAMPLE 29. Thomson, The Plough That Broke the Plains, “Finale” (“We're Goin' to Leave Ol' Texas Now”), mm. 98-110
In his instructions to Thomson, Lorentz described the “Devastation” sequence with the phrase “They are literally leaving old Texas,” apparently referring to the western folk song “Leaving Old Texas.” Although closely related to the famous “Oh Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairee,” its lyrics do not record the lament of a dying cowboy; instead they speak of abandoning the grasslands: “I'm going to leave old Texas now, / They've got no use for the longhorn cow, / They've plowed and fenced my cattle range, / And the people there are all so strange.” This cowboy chooses to go south, and other variants take “The Trail to Mexico” as their title.81 Steinbeck later included “Leaving Old Texas” among the song repertory of the Okies in his 1939 novel Grapes of Wrath, not just because of its name but also because he associated it with something ancient, calling it “that eerie song that was sung before the Spaniards came, only the wor
ds were Indian then.”82
Though he could not have known Steinbeck's work in 1936, Thomson at the very least took Lorentz's words to heart. (Steinbeck may have as well—both The Plow and Lorentz's film Ecce Homo were acknowledged influences on Grapes of Wrath.) On the reverse of Lorentz's typescript instructions, Thomson penciled in a list of relevant images in a column on the left: “trailer disappearing,” “2 cars arrive in Cal.,” “line of cars on high-way,” and so forth. The right-hand side reads “fugue” and “leaving Texas.” The fugue in “Devastation” is identical to the one that closes the “Prelude,” but “leaving Texas” is a coda that marks the migrants' arrival in California. He also penciled “I'm goin' to / to [sic] leave Ol Texas now” next to “feet walking through sand” in the drought sequences and he subtitled the finale of the piano suite drawn from The Plow (including the material of the prelude and the tango coda) “We're Goin' to Leave Ol' Texas Now.”
To my ears, no part of The Plow quotes directly from the source tunes for “Oh Bury Me Not” / “Leaving Old Texas,” but there are some suggestive details.83 First and foremost, the textual reference to Mexico might help justify the idiosyncratic pairing of Okies and the habañera. In his article “Swing Music,” Thomson identified its characteristic pattern with the label “Tango. Enter the Latin influ-ence.”84 A casual conflation of Mexico and California under the “Latin” rubric is all that Thomson would have needed to justify his tango. More speculatively still, the prevalent poetic meter of “Oh Bury Me Not”; / “Leaving Old Texas” (short-short-short-LONG) may be obliquely or subliminally related to the melodic figure in example 29, drawn from the fugue subject that appears in the “Prelude” and “Devastation” sequences. If any of these associations hold true, then “Leaving Old Texas” might be considered the theme song of The Plow. Its rhythms fill the long opening and closing sequences; its text describes the Okies' plight; and the Charleston of the “Speculation” sequence bears its rhythmic motto (which Thomson once described with the caption “Jazz takes a tango accent”).85