Great Depression Movies

Period music, film clips and newsreel footage combined into a visual exploration of the American entertainment industry during the Great Depression.

Prizefighter Jimmy Nolan, facing an opportunity to get a championship fight, is knocked out when he sustains what is apparently a permanent injury to...

Threatened with separation, two young brothers escape from an orphanage and make a perilous journey from New York to Boys' Town in Nebraska.

At the height of the Great Depression, the showman of a renowned circus leads his troupe through the devastated American landscape, lifting the...

Two segments (“Thanksgiving Nightmare” and “Thanksgiving Dreams”) and several mini segments explore the traditions, fun, and...

The Bergers, a blue-collar Jewish family living in an overstuffed tenement and undone by the Depression, struggle through hard times and dream of a...

It's the winter of 1935 and Max Brown is newly arrived in Willowgreen, Saskatchewan - a rural Canadian prairie town - on his first teaching job in a...

The lives of the average Quebecois Plouffe family during the final years of the depression and through World War II.

Elizabeth Rimplegar inhabits a household populated by virtual lunatics. Her mother, Nellie, mishandled the family fortune, and, alas, the stock...

Quebec Bill Bohomme is a hardy schemer and dreamer, who, desperate to raise money to preserve his endangered herd through the rapidly approaching...

A sudden windfall has unexpected consequences on a working class girl during the Great Depression.

In the midst of the Depression, a crotchety doctor, whose practice is in the Brooklyn slums, takes an interest in a local teenager, whose hostility...

Tough Aggie gives a street guy polish and a rich kid gumption.

Southern California's Hotel Coronado caters to and is frequented by members of the social upper-crust. Although she lives on the wrong side of the...

A high living society playboy marries a nightclub singer, and she soon realizes that, though they're genuinely in love, the husband's endless...

Riding the Rails offers a visionary perspective on the presumed romanticism of the road and cautionary legacy of the Great Depression. The filmmakers...

Two waiters in Depression-era Arkansas get involved in the numbers racket.

A drunkard climbs a ladder into a bedroom in the wrong house and gets romantically involved with the woman who lives there.

For twelve years he stood as America's 32nd President, a man who overcame the ravages of polio to pull America through the Great Depression and WWII....

A film documenting work shortages during the Depression of the 1930s and the attempts to deal with the unemployed, in particular young men. The film...