Not familiar at all with “The Other Half.” Never even heard of it. The earliest Vidor item I think I’ve seen is “The Sky Pilot,” with Colleen Moore. I guess I usually view items like “The Crowd” and “Street Scene,” coupled with the romanticism of “The Stranger’s Return” and “Billy the Kid” as more of that kind of anti-urban, back-to-nature mindset, as opposed to the kind of stark left/right paradigm that typified the Dalton Trumbo ilk. Not that Vidor wasn’t of-the-left, it’s just that I suppose I view that earlier generationalm turn-of-the-century populism/progressivism as a slightly different animal, with its odd emphasis on pro-pastoral iconography and romanticism. Doesn’t strike me as the kind of hammer-and-fist propaganda of the “Waiting for Lefty” Broadway/NYC crowd.
When I first saw “Our Daily Bread,” it was a ragged, chopped-up 16mm tv-print, and apparently part of a syndicated package of oddball, orphan movies, like the comedy “His Double Life” (1933) with Roland Young and Lillian Gish, and “Winterset” (1936) with Burgess Meredith.
My grandmother got me interested in silent and early talkie movies, when I was very little, by telling me about them. So when they appeared on T.V., I watched them and was even more fascinated by them. I don't know if they still do, but MOMA used to show silents one night a week, so I had the chance to see even more obscure old movies that way.
You need to see the complete OUR DAILY BREAD; it's even MORE obviously far lefty when seen that way !
American rabid far lefties and those who were just FELLOW TRAVELERS were not part of a naive generation! I think that you need to look into this a bit more closely and don't forget that there were Fabian Socialists here too; not just in England.