St Jean de Crèvecoeur described pre-industrial America as a pastoral haven. "We are a people of cultivators," he wrote, "scattered over an immense territory communicating with each other by means of good roads and navigable rivers, united by the silken bands of mild government, all respecting the laws, without dreading their power, because they are equitable." According to Thomas Jefferson, the citizens of this rural democracy are virtuous because they live off the land: "Those who labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, if ever He had a chosen people, whose breasts He has made his peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue. […] Corruption of morals in the mass of cultivators is a phenomenon of which no age nor nation has furnished an example." Jefferson's utopian dream became more and more improbable however, as waves of immigrants went further and further west in their unquenchable search for land.Hamlin Garland realistically portrays the harsh living conditions of the prairie farmers, whose homesteading dream soon turned into a nightmare as they became increasingly dependent on the railways and greedy land companies. Indeed, by the 1870s, a majority of farmers were either tenants or sharecroppers, sometimes driven to violence, as William Faulkner's gripping Barn Burning powerfully shows. Their anger and frustration resulted in the populist surge of the late 19^th century. The agricultural boom of the first world war soon led to overproduction in the 1920s. The Great Depression forced a lot of small farmers off their land, so much so that by 1940 their numbers had dropped to 23% of the population. The "green revolution" of the 1950s sped up the decline of the family farm and the advent of agribusiness. In the 1970s, euphoric American farmers responded enthusiastically to increasing world demand. This agricultural boom was short-lived, however, and the economic crisis of the 1980s dealt a terrible blow to what was left of small farmers. By the end of the decade, family farms had all but disappeared from the scene, since they only accounted for 1.9 % of the population. Family farmers struggled desperately to survive in a market taken over by large-scale farming.

In spite of the steady decline of the yeoman-farmer concept, the myth held fast until the Great Depression, as Herbert Hoover's following statement clearly shows: "For agriculture, as no other industry, develops strong individualism, independent character, initiative and resource. Farm life is free from a certain artificiality of urban life, because it is in close contact with nature, and is less subject to the insidious forces of moral degeneration which are such strong corroding influences in the life of our great cities." The advent of the New Deal was a turning point. F. D. Roosevelt declared that " equality of opportunity as we know it no longer exists. Our industrial plant is built. Our last frontier has long been reached." But the need to preserve a significant farming community was nevertheless asserted by Roosevelt's Agriculture Secretary, Henry A. Wallace: "When former civilizations have fallen, there is a strong reason for believing that they fell because they couldn't achieve the necessary balance between city and country." Five decades later, the advocates of agrarianism revived the plea for the family farm: "And what America needs again so desperately is a solid middle-class society of independent smallholders. […] The joys of rural life […] are still very much realizable, a very real antidote to the restlessness and chaos that infects modern life ." 

Since the early days of the motion pictures, the pastoral vein has been a major source of inspiration for filmmakers. The uplifting moral fables of the silent era praised the virtues of country living as opposed to urban corruption. In the social problem melodramas of the Progressive Era, villainous landlords and corrupt politicians were a common sight on the movie screens of pre-World War One America. As the screenwriters' manual indicated, the melodrama, with its archetypal figures, was an ideal vehicle for translating social problems and political controversies into entertaining myths for the masses. The hero or heroine of the film suffered in a romanticized fashion but was eventually assisted by fate. Such archetypes have never really left the motion picture, nor has the "happy ending" which restored faith in the enduring individual. 

In the midst of the urban euphoria of the 1920s, a few screen dramas painted an idealized picture of a rural arcadia. Among the most noteworthy were Tol’able David (1921), directed by Henry King, which praised the virtues of pre-industrial America – honesty, fear of God, hard work, family and community spirit – and Murnau's Sunrise, A Song of Two Humans. Shot in Hollywood in 1927, the film tells the story of a farm couple almost torn apart by the lure of the city. A vamp convinces the farmer to kill his wife, sell his farm and join her in the brightly-lit city. The urban world is seen as a metaphor of the excesses of passion and of the sin the farmer is about to commit. The general trend from dark to lighter images through the course of the movie symbolizes its main character's moral regeneration; even the women are opposed in this way. 

The advent of sound, the Wall Street Crash and the enforcement of the "Production Code" led to greater studio hegemony, which resulted in the development of the genre film. Although the pastoral vein cannot be identified as a genre, it runs through the American cinema and prevails in countless Western films extolling the beauties of the American wilderness. The Western deals with the conquest of the land and its often violent transformation into a "garden." In John Ford’s The Man Who shot Liberty Valance (1962), aging Hallie Stoddard exclaims at the sight of the rural landscape which has replaced the frontier: "It was once a wilderness, now it's a garden." In the Western epic tales, the male hero does not settle on the land, he conquers it or helps the farmers' families defend their property against evil enemies and rides away. Yancey Cravat, the restless hero of Anthony Mann's Cimarron, a 1960 remake of Wesley Ruggles's 1931 epic, marvels at Oklahoma's rich soil but cannot resist an irrepressible impulse to go west. George Stevens's Shane (1953) encapsulates all the established aspects of the legendary West as developed in films over the years. It is actually a conscious tribute to the Western Legend as we have come to perceive it: the pioneering family trying to build a home in the wilderness, the fight for control of the land between cattlemen and homesteaders, and miraculous help appearing in the form of a mysterious gunman named Shane, who becomes the idol of young Joey Starrett. Shane succeeds in routing the powerful ranchers' hired guns, then rides off forever. By the time Joey cries for Shane's return, we understand that he is crying for his lost innocence. 

The nostalgic plea for the blessed innocence of the pastoral golden age is the trademark of a spate of back-to-the-earth films, among which Frank Capra's populist tales of the 1930s and 1940s have survived to this day. In the Depression era, the disillusioned middle class were in bad need of myths and dreams. The shattering of the myth of industrial and urban success provided the "Dream Factory" with an ideal opportunity to advocate a return to the grassroots. Frank Capra portrayed the small town as an unspoiled populist haven, miraculously protected from unemployment and poverty. Unforeseen – and undesired – circumstances force the hero to leave this blessed oasis for the big city, where his homely virtues eventually overcome the selfishness and cynicism of double-dealing journalists, bent policemen or corrupt politicians, also known as "shysters." 

Halfway between the Western and the Populist genres, a small body of rural dramas appeared in the thirties in the wake of the back-to-the-earth mood prevailing in those days. These films deal with farming families basking in the joys of country living or struggling to preserve the way of life and the environment they cherish. In keeping with the Jeffersonian tradition, they resolutely stick to the myth of the yeoman farmer and are mostly nostalgic in feeling. The appearance of this vein coincided with the advent of economic difficulties for family farmers in the 1930s. Like the Western, however, the rural film claims a documentary approach to rural problems but escapes into the world of myth. Documentary expression developed in the thirties because left-wing journalists and social workers felt it necessary to inform the more fortunate classes about the hardship of the poor and unemployed. The documentary book used words and photographs to describe a social condition. The most famous of these was Erskine Caldwell's and Margaret Bourke-White's You have Seen Their Faces (1937), which described the plight of Southern sharecroppers. It was the opportunity for Caldwell to show that the conditions he described in Tobacco Road and God's Little Acre were true. With James Agee's and Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise famous Men (1941), the documentary book was at its apex. The American public discovered the appalling living conditions to which the descendants of the pioneers were now reduced. The New Deal institutionalized the documentary form because it was a useful propaganda tool. The documentary films made by Pare Lorentz on behalf of the Resettlement Administration and of the United States Film Service blended realism and poetry to make their social message both powerful and effective. Like many artists of the decade, Lorentz turned away from fiction and decided to "make poetry of our problems" as the cameraman Willard van Dyke put it. The Plow that Broke the Plains (1936), and The River (1937), are documentary Westerns, melodramatic accounts of the Dust Bowl and of the Mississippi's devastating floods. Much more nostalgic, Robert Flaherty'sThe land (1942), is a sad plea for America's lost dream. These documentary films had a powerful impact on Hollywood productions of the decade.

In the early 1930s, few fiction films seriously dealt with the farmers' problems, however. In Lewis Jacobs’s own words, "most pictures, nostalgic and idyllic in feeling, show the farmer happy in rural community life, far more fortunate in his opportunities than the city dweller." This is probably due to the fact that the impoverished urban middle class, who had idealized memories of the country, needed to believe that there still existed a "frontier," a safety valve, an escape from the ills and evils of the unemployment-ridden city. Two of the most successful populist romances were Henry King’sState Fair (1933) - starring Will Rogers - and David Harum (1934), a nostalgic escape to Homeville, a kind of pre-World-War-Two replica of Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon.

In keeping with the documentary vein and the social consciousness of the New Deal years, a few Hollywood fictions managed to achieve a blend of pastoral nostalgia and of realism in their portrayal of farmers: Michael Curtiz's Cabin in the Cotton (1932), is best remembered today for Bette Davis's first screen appearance. King Vidor's Our Daily Bread (1934), is definitely the film which best reflects the contradictions of the early New Deal, since it advocates a return to the land and the organization of rural cooperatives as the only solution to unemployment. But in spite of its documentary style and social protest undertones, Our Daily Bread is a celebration of America's early communes and of the spiritual bond between the farmer and the earth. By the end of the decade, the need to revive the pioneer spirit grew stronger as international tension was building up, and the embattled farmer was again featured as the victim of anonymous evil powers and as the bulwark of imperiled democracy in John Ford's Drums along the Mohawk (1939), and The Grapes of Wrath (1940). In this respect, the two films echo St Jean de Crévecoeur's vision of the farmer as the archetypal American and as an icon of threatened innocence and freedom. Ford's equation between happiness and agrarian life is made quite explicit in Drums along the Mohawk. When this sacred bond is broken, as happens to the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, the family gradually disintegrates. The Joads' journey to California serves as an ironical counterpoint to the pioneers' journey west, a heroic quest during which their virtues are put to the test. Their trials and tribulations echo the Hebrews' endless wanderings in search of the Promised Land. Although its style is vastly different from that of Gone with the Wind (1939), The Grapes of Wrath tells more or less the same story as David O'Selznick's lavish production. Both films are about families undergoing social change and both conclude that the bond between the people and the land is indestructible. "We'll go on forever because we are the people" says Ma Joad, while Gone with the Wind concludes that "the land is everything that counts. The land is the only thing that lasts." Both films set the archetype of the strong heroine fighting against all odds for her family and land.

The equation of agrarianism with happiness and the celebration of the pioneer as the bulwark of American democracy are clearly established in Howard Hawks's Sergeant York, (1941) and in Bernard Vorhaus's Three Faces West, a lesser known rural drama also released in 1940. Both films indulge in sentimental renderings of the pastoral oasis. In Sergeant York, it is a secluded valley protected from the outside world, like Frank Capra's Shangri-La in Lost Horizon. "How did you find this place?" asks the peddler, tired by his long and arduous journey to Alvin York's remote village lost in the back hills of Tennessee. "We were born here!" answers one of the villagers. The farmers of Three Faces West, however, have to leave their Dust Bowl town to embark on a perilous trip to Oregon, which develops into a metaphor of the conquest of the west, the fight against fascism and the Hebrews' return from Egypt. 

The nostalgic mood definitely took over as the the 1930s faded away. John Ford's grotesque Southern sharecroppers in Tobacco Road (1941) reflect the decay of the Old South and the demise of the rural family: "Come a time when the land fell fallow, and worse and worse. But you think the Lesters would leave it? No, Sir. They stayed on and on, but all that they had and all that they were, that’s all gone with the wind and the dust." Renoir's The Southerner (1945), is much more optimistic but the story is told by a narrator who remembers the days gone by as he leafs through an old family album. In the fifties and sixties, rural themes became less popular as a lot of farmers left the land to find easier and better-paid jobs in the city. The counter culture of the sixties regarded the farmers as backward, narrow-minded rednecks. Far from being considered a haven, the farm turns into a deadly trap for the two escaped convicts of The Defiant Ones (1958) and the myth of the small town is overtly debunked in Adams at 6 a.m. (1970). One film, however, casts a nostalgic look at the disappearance of the rural South. Set in the New Deal years, Elia Kazan's Wild River (1960) is probably a turning point in the Hollywood Pastoral in that it revisits the dreams and paradoxes of the 1930s and heralds the death of the Pastoral. Ella Garth is an old survivor of the generation that settled the Tennessee valley. By refusing to bow to the diktat of the department of Agriculture, the old pioneer symbolizes the proud and desperate fight of the farmer against progress. The old woman's farm is symbolically located on an island in the middle of the Tennessee river. The decision to flood the valley in order to construct a dam that will bring electricity to the whole county forces Ella Garth off her land. As the century-old trees are felled by TVA workers, she leaves her island on a boat bearing the flag of the United States and dies soon after. 

The death of the Pastoral is indeed the main theme of the second wave of rural films. At the end of the 1970s, the documentary tradition was revived with the release of two independent productions: Heartland and Northern Lights. Richard Pearce's description of the harsh life of a frontier woman in Wyoming at the turn of the century and Rob Nilsson's reminder of the fight of Scandinavian-born farmers against the banks and the big merchants are naturalistic and uncompromising accounts of the plight of homesteaders. Both films uphold the populist belief in the indomitable will of the people against the organized powers that are out to crush them. 

In Days of Heaven, also produced in the late 1970s, Terrence Malick goes one step further and demonstrates in a masterful way that, on the eve of its involvement in the first world war, America was moving further and further away from the agrarian myth. He shows convincingly that the populist dream has spawned a monster, the big Texan farmer, who reigns over hundreds of migrant farm hands like a feudal baron. The story symbolically takes place on the verge of the United States' involvement in World War One. America is therefore in the process of losing its innocence: the machine has already soiled the "garden," the city has corrupted the country, and the yeoman farmer has become a capitalistic landowner. As in East of Eden (1955), the protagonists' passage from innocence to experience echoes the country's ominous transformation. The characters are the victims of their naive faith in a warped American Dream. Like George and Lennie in Gary Sinise's Of Mice and Men (1992), they are only allowed a fleeting glimpse of the rural paradise they long for. 

That three films dealing with the life and predicament of the American farmer should have come out in 1984 reveals the extent of the emotion aroused in the country by the farm crisis of the 1980s. Unable to keep up with soaring interest rates and costs, many small farmers were faced with bankruptcy and foreclosure. In this respect, Country and The River tell a remarkably similar story, and in both films the farm auction figures as a pivotal dramatic moment. Places in the Heart is a little different in that it takes place in Depression-era Texas and is somewhat similar in plot to Our Daily Bread, since it advocates a return to the land as the only alternative to the break-up of the family. Besides, these films cling to Crèvecoeur's and Jefferson's contention that the American identity rests essentially on the family farm, and that the values that this sort of life entails are somehow at the heart of America. It is the idea that labor on the land produces people who are independent and fiercely jealous of their freedoms. Like the films of the 1930s, these narratives are about the confrontation between the agrarian ideal and ruthless economic interests. More than that, the defense of the farm against enemies that have no names has a mythic dimension. It reproduces the very process by which pre-industrial America built itself. In this confrontation, the rural virtues of purity, toughness and independence are put to the test. Following in the footsteps of The Grapes of Wrath, these films turn the farmer's wife into the heroine of the quest. The farmers manage to unite and win a temporary victory over the formidable forces beleaguered against them, but the spectator is left with the depressing thought that they already belong to the past. 

In recent years, newcomers have taken up the fight of small farmers against profit. In Robert Redford's The Milagro Beanfield War (1988), a Chicano village stands up to the promoters of a development project that threatens to turn their valley into a recreation area. Led by an indomitable woman, they rout the intruders and rejoice on the liberated beanfield, clinging stubbornly to the dream that true community and virtue are the truth of the country. But Hollywood's portrayal of the farm has become more and more symbolic and nostalgic of late: Ray Kinsella, in Field of Dreams (1988), ploughs under his corn to make way for a baseball field and thus bring back to life the ghosts that haunt his memory. Finally, David lynch's The Straight Story (1999) sadly shows that rural America is on the verge of extinction. Indeed, 73-year-old Alvin Straight's mock-epic journey to his brother's run-down place is a journey into his own past and may well be a desperate quest for America's lost past.