One of the few films to portray the impact of the Great Depression on working-class Americans, Our Daily Bread chronicles an urban couple’s quest to transform a modest plot of farmland into a thriving agricultural collective. The film’s impressive portrayal of communal physical labor earned it second prize at an annual film exhibition in Moscow and a League of Nations award “for its contribution to humanity.” 1934, U.S., BW, 35mm, 80 minutes.
Karen Morley was an active unionist in Hollywood as well as in North Carolina, where she helped to organize a strike by tobacco workers. She was blacklisted in 1952 after being named a communist and invoking the fifth amendment at the HUAC hearings. She never returned to the screen again. Her films include Flesh (1932), Scarface (1932), Gabriel Over the White House (1933), Black Fury (1935), and The Unknown (1946).