As the Earth Turns

1934 was smack dab in the middle of the Depression, and a time when a much larger portion of the population was in rural areas and movies about small farmers were a thing. As such, it was with some interest that I decided to record and watch As the Earth Turns the last time it ran on TCM.

The movie opens up in the winter, with a wagon making it way through the snows of Maine, carrying a family to a dilapidated farm. This family, the Janowskis, are Polish immigrant tailors, except that their son Stan (Donald Woods) has wanted to be a farmer. And with business in the city not being so good, they decided to invest in Stan's future despite them having to spend the winter in a barn instead of a real farmhouse.

Another family is watching the wagon make its way through the snow. This family is headed by Mil Shaw, who is married to George with five kids. I say that she's the head of the family rather than George largely because George seems terminally lazy to the point that you wonder how the family could even survive. The answer to that question is that George gets no little bit of help from his brother Mark (David Landau), whose first wife died some time back but who has remarried to Cora (Clara Blandick), who came from the city together with daughter Doris.

Cora has grown resentul of having to live on a farm and has been raising Doris to have the same attitude. That, and Cora is hoping to send Doris to secretarial shool to get the hell away from the farm. Not resentful is Mark's biological daughter Jen (Jean Muir), who seems on her way to becoming a spinster, but who seems to have no issue with this and actually seems to love farming regardless of how difficult it is. Her biological brother Ollie (William Janney) is the one that the family is really pinning its hopes on; they've scrimped to send him to college and he's got prospects to become a lawyer after graduating some years down the road.

It seems fairly obvious that Stan and Jen are going to become attracted to each other, although Jen isn't so sure of this largely because she understands just how difficult the farming life is and wants Stan to be certain he's ready to live with what is more or less a calling. The other part of the film involves the resentments that the various female characters have: Mil over her shiftless husband -- she even thinks of leaving him at one point -- and Doris over her youth being wasted. She'll pursue any man be it her own stepbrother or even Stan if Jen doesn't jump at the opportunity to have Stan.

As the Earth Turns is an interesting movie. It was released by Warner Bros., who, to be honest, aren't the studio I'd think of as being the best to make a rural movie. But this is more of a social issues movie set against a rural backdrop (really the backlot of course), and Warner Bros. were quite good at making such issues pictures back in the 1930s. Donald Woods isn't convincingly Polish immigrant at all, but this is really Jean Muir's movie, and she does quite a good job. And the movie packs a whole lot of conflict into its brief (73 minute) running time.

As the Earth Turns is definitely worth a watch if you haven't seen it before.