0l' Man River

Hollywood premieres are noted for fancy clothes and phoney congratulations. The first showing of the Department of Agriculture's documentary film, The River, at the little Strand Theatre in New Orleans last week, was marked by plain clothes and sincere praise. What the audience of educators, legislators, literati and plain people saw was a motion picture of startling photographic beauty, sweeping scope and social importance. A swift cinematic history of the vast Mississippi system from pre-Columbian times to yesterday afternoon, an inventory of its bounty and its toll, a report of Government reclamation activity, The River was in the same small class with Robert Flaherty's Mo'ana, John Grierson's Drifters, Joris Ivens' New Earth.

First New Deal documentary film was last year's The Plow that Broke the Plains. Like The Plow, The River was conceived and produced by Cinemacritic Pare Lorentz (McCall's, Vanity Fair), who had sold both ideas to Resettlement Administrator Rexford Guy Tugwell before Tugwell left the Brain Trust for the molasses business. Sponsor of the finished film is the Farm Security Administration, successor to the Resettlement Administration in the Department of Agriculture.

Like the mighty Mississippi that is both hero and villain of the picture. The River has a powerful locomotive quality that is pointed up by a Virgil Thompson (Four Saints in Three Acts) score based on bright scraps of locality music, matched in tempo by a cadenced narrative written by Lorentz.

Drops of water trickling down a wooded hillside swell to a runnel, a rivulet, a brook, a creek, join the great feeder streams and then the long, smooth, thousand-mile slide of the Big River, widening to the Gulf. Down river cotton is king. Up north there is timber. "We built a hundred cities and a thousand towns but at what a cost." The forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota slip down sluices to the tune of "A Hot Time in the Old Town Tonight." The Alleghenies are laid open in the quest for coal and ore. And the uncontrolled Mississippi floods to the delta, carrying the topsoil of the valley with it, leaving gullied hills, scalped plains. As an indication of how the great system can be saved from self destruction, an epilogue shows a glimpse of the flood control and reclamation work of the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Pare Lorentz, a West Virginian, at 36 is senior among nationally-known cinema critics. He made The Plow that Broke the Plains for $12,000 to enter the U. S. in the documentary film field, then had to get out and distribute it to independent exhibitors, the big companies having turned thumbs down on it, presumably because it represented government-in-the-movie-business. The River cost just short of $50,000, took a six-man crew six months on a 22,000-mile tour of the Mississippi valley. Just when the camera work seemed finished, in January, came the disastrous flood of last winter. Lorentz and his crew stayed in the flood area until Feb. 24, shot 80,000 feet of film. Only a few hundred feet were used in the picture; the rest went to the Department of Agriculture archives.

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