The Dust Bowl

The Dust Bowl, collecting so much oral history that was about to pass away, is a treasure.

The drought-stricken, spirit-sapping Great Plains of the 1930s get the lyrical and learned Burns treatment.

This beautiful and often moving film resonates even more powerfully with Sandy in our rearview mirror, while Burns' favorite theme--the American character--is drawn here with great clarity.

Ken Burns' documentary about the "black blizzards" that swept across the Great Plains during the 1930s is at once rigorously sourced and heartbreakingly emotional.

This series is Burns doing Guthrie, bringing a lifetime of experience and craft to bear on a story of people struggling through hard times. He's picking up a guitar and telling us a story--a great one.

As a filmmaker, Burns brings to bear a special vividness of scrutiny. No matter how familiar the material, he makes it seem as though he's discovering it afresh--so the viewer feels that way, too.

Though it has the pokey pace and flat affect of his other films--for Burns, history is elegy--it is also one of his best works: more tightly focused than usual in time and place, with a clear shape, dramatic arcs and a conclusion that is at once cautionary and moving, topical and timeless.

The Dust Bowl sounds like a dry subject, no cheap pun intended, and Burns works hard to humanize it by talking with some of the now-elderly people who made it through.

The story of the Dust Bowl is complicated, twisting together ecology, economics and politics, as well as divisions of class and region, and Mr. Burns and his writer, Dayton Duncan, have done as careful and admirable a job as you would expect in laying it out.

The Dust Bowl is a powerful documentary about what human efforts can achieve and what short-term thinking can wreak.

Unlike a lot of TV documentarians, Burns steadfastly refuses to include dramatic re-creations, relying (as he did in "Prohibition," an early-20th-century companion to this) on photographs, grainy video, actors' readings of diaries or news articles, and of course those aforementioned interviews. The last might be the most compelling, providing a bridge from the macro to the micro.

Although the film ends on an odd note that seems to endorse near-subsistence farming as the only moral and sustainable form of agriculture, it makes an important record of a receding era.

The Dust Bowl is more like eat-your-vegetables television than some of Burns' other endeavors, namely his last PBS documentary, "Prohibition." But it's still a worthwhile examination of an overlooked chapter from our past that holds plenty of lessons for our future.

It's a deeply researched, visually superb two-part study of what the film terms "a decade-long natural catastrophe of biblical proportions." ... The second chapter on Monday night, "Reaping the Whirlwind," is slower and less informative.

It would be naughty to call it dry. But the lack of personalities leaves the viewer groping for an angle. The overwhelming nature of the event begins to feel overwhelming on the couch, too.