The River (1938 film)

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The River

Directed by	Pare Lorentz
Written by	Pare Lorentz
Cinematography	Floyd Crosby Willard Van Dyke
Distributed by	Farm Security Administration
Release date(s)	February 4, 1938
Running time	31 min.
Country	United States
Language	English
IMDb profile

The River (1938) is a short documentary film which shows the importance of the Mississippi River to the United States, and how farming and timber practices had caused topsoil to be swept down the river and into the Gulf of Mexico.

It was written and directed by Pare Lorentz and, like Lorentz's earlier documentary The Plow That Broke the Plains, was also selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant", going into the registry in 1990. Both films have notable scores by Virgil Thomson that are still heard as concert suites.

The two films were sponsored by the U.S. government and specifically the Resettlement Administration (RA) to raise awareness about the New Deal. The RA was folded into the Farm Security Administration in 1937, so The River was officially an FSA production.