The novelist who wrote THE GRAPES OF WRATH and the director who produced Turmoil AND LIGHTS OUT in European countries combined their superb talents to tell the story of the coming of modern medicine to the natives of Mexico. There have been several notable examples of this pen-camera approach to narration, but THE FORGOTTEN VILLAGE is unique among them for the reason that the written text was created before an individual picture was shot. The publication and the movie from which it was made have, thus, a continuity and a dramatic growth not about The Forgotten Village: Life inside a Mexican Community found in the so-called ‘documentary’ films.

The camera crew that, going by Kline and with Steinbeck’s script accessible, documented this narrative of birth and death, of witch doctors and vaccines, from the aged Mexico and the new, spent 9 months from the trails of Mexico. They traveled a large number of kilometers to find just the town they needed; they borrowed kids from the government school, took men from the areas, their wives in the markets, a vintage medicine woman from her hut by the medial side of the path. The motion picture they produced (for launch in 1941) is usually 8000 feet long. From this prosperity of photos 136 photographs had been selected because of their intrinsic beauty and for the elegant harmony with which they accompany Steinbeck’s text.

This new script-photograph technique of narration conveys its ideas with unexcelled brilliance and immediacy. In the hands of such get better at story-tellers as Steinbeck and Kline, it creates the reader capture his breath.