King Vidor's Our Daily Bread was released in the United States in 1934 and seen around much of the world in the subsequent two years. It has received attention as an unusual cinematic product of its times, a depiction of desperate economic problems and of the difficulty of addressing them by cooperative means. The film had its origins in Vidor's desire, as a successful MGM director, to experiment and break free of what he described, in a September 1934 New Theatre article, as ‘rubber stamp movies’. After unsuccessful attempts to work with MGM and RKO, Vidor made Our Daily Bread independently, with distribution by United Artists. This chapter revisits and explores the film's production history, its ideological and aesthetic motifs, and its exhibition and reception in the United States and beyond, not least its apparent failure at the domestic box office. Mark Glancy and John Sedgwick, in their survey of American cinema-going in the mid-1930s, refer to Vidor's film as ‘uniquely unpopular’ and as ‘among the lowest grossing films in almost every city it played’. Drawing also on an intriguing publicity still of Vidor and some cast members on location, I explore the relationship between the film and those then advocating various forms of cooperative activity as a response to the Depression, including the California Cooperative League, Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal administration and Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) campaign for the state governorship.

The director of eleven films for MGM in the second half of the 1920s, the thirty-six-year old Vidor signed a new contract with the studio in 1930. His huge silent-era successes had been The Big Parade (1925) and The Crowd (1928), with the latter questioning the viability of an individual's dream of success and upward mobility without endorsing any collective class agency. Vidor's willingness to experiment, both in terms of theme and aesthetics, also gained him a following in the newly emergent periodicals dealing with the medium of talking pictures. Friendly with Sergei Eisenstein during the Soviet director's frustrating stay at Paramount in 1930, he had hosted a showing of the latter's silent film about collectivisation, The General Line (The Old and the New), at his home.