that Vidor called “A perfectly natural finish for the story of Mr. Anyman” (Bergman 76).In the early 1930s Vidor wanted to take the trials and unrest of the common man and put it into a film, so he read as many articles as he could on the subject (Vidor 220). He came across an article by a college professor in Reader’s Digest that proposed the implementation of agricultural co-operatives as a solution to unemployment. Vidor used this concept to formulate his story with his wife, and the two of them began work on the script. They finished the story in four months, which they titled Our Daily Bread. It followed a trend of other “back to the earth” films that came out in 1933, such as King Kong, State Fair, The Life of Jimmy Dolan, and Stranger’s Return.With the script finished Vidor tried to sell the idea to Irving Thalberg at MGM, but although he expressed a liking for the story, he didn’t think it appropriate for MGM (Vidor 221). Vidor had no better luck with anyone else until he appealed to Charlie Chaplin, a co-owner of United Artists. UA agreed to release the picture, but Vidor still had to produce it himself. To get funding he hocked everything he could, raising about $125,000 to budget his film. With this money Vidor was able to make his film about an ideal social system, where people work together towards a common goal with a relationship based on trust to form a utopian community, showing the romantic idealist in Vidor (Welsh 446). Vidor wanted to take the same protagonists from The Crowd, John and Mary, and place them in Our Daily Bread so that he could move them out of the city and show them in a rural environment. Vidor wanted to offer an alternative lifestyle that involved getting away from the big cities and living off of the land. His conception of the agricultural co-operatives suggested a shifting away from industrialization and instead refocusing on the countries agricultural st...
