What do they call this place we are going to?
Paradise.
No, I mean, other people.
Oh, they call it Brooklyn.
What to do with a picture like Give Us This Day?
For one thing, it stands up very well as a domestic drama, a successor in certain ways to King Vidor’s The Crowd. It’s about how the everyday luxuries that constitute the fabric of American culture are not, contra magazine spreads and stump speeches, simply the logical reward of hard work and individual initiative. Give Us This Day shows, in scene after painstaking scene, how a family with the best of intentions may well never achieve its dream. That this obvious fact of sociology nevertheless sounds radical and unexpected in entertainment terms makes a film like Give Us This Day quite bracing, especially today. Indeed, to watch Give Us This Day now invites a certain wistful nostalgia for a moment when a family headed by a sporadically-employed immigrant bricklayer could even contemplate owning a home, an unspeakable ambition for a generation’s worth of college graduates and advanced degree holders these days.
But Give Us This Day is notable for far more than its rarely-fashionable grimness. Like Salt of the Earth, its more storied successor, Give Us This Day is a movie made by blacklisted talent exiled from Hollywood and unusually committed to feeling out what a socially-implicated narrative feature might look and sound like. Inarguably, the answer offered by Give Us This Day is curiously circumspect: aside from an errant ‘CP’ scrawled innocently on a beam in the background of an early scene, there’s next to no acknowledgement of the radical political ideas that halted the careers of actor Sam Wanamaker, writer Ben Barzman, and director Edward Dmytryk. Though such issues as workplace safety and incentive structures that pit workers against each other form important plot points, the possibility of unionization is hardly broached. A ‘union meeting’ is cited once—as the half-assed alibi that Wanamaker supplies when visiting his mistress (Kathleen Ryan).
