A recent news story introduced a novel solution to nearly 60 years of hand-wringing over the Santa Margarita River.
A giant rubber dam.
To Fallbrookians with long memories, the inflatable dam calls to mind one of the damndest local movies ever made.
The uncredited work of Frank Capra, “The Fallbrook Story” is a 20-minute jewel of Cold War-era propaganda thundering against the evils of Big Bureaucracy.
Capra – you know him as the prolific director of such socially super-conscious classics as “It's a Wonderful Life” and “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” – had a big, thirsty dog in the local fight.
In 1951, Capra was living amid groves of olive trees on his 1,000-acre Red Mountain Ranch in Fallbrook.
The federal government, which in 1941 had purchased the old Rancho Santa Margarita to create Camp Pendleton, was worried that ranches upstream would hog and/or pollute the Santa Margarita River, which ran through Camp Pendleton.
To exert its control over the river, the U.S. attorney general sued thousands of property owners in and around Fallbrook, setting off a panic on Main Street.
With narrated purple prose and silent dramatic scenes with actors, Capra's film documents how Fallbrook pushed back against evil.
Cecil B. DeMille, the epic Hollywood director, introduces “The Fallbrook Story”:
“This film tells the simple story of plain people fighting for their rights under the American Constitution. It sustains your faith in representative government. This story shows the supremacy of the people and their elected representatives. It demonstrates that truth and tenacity can overthrow tyranny.
“The events shown here have become as much a part (of our life) as Lexington and Yorktown. This victory of the people thrills me, as it will all Americans. You'll win great satisfaction in 'The Fallbrook Story.' ”
The action begins with a plume of water. A deep-voiced male narrator, the film's only audible human voice, states the obvious:
“This is water. It is life. From it the tiny lips of all growing things suck their strength at the breast of Nature. Out of the water of the field is distilled the sweet juice of the orange and the nectar of the pomegranate. Water made possible the Garden of Eden and sustained the flocks of Abraham.”
Suddenly, the pastoral scenes turn ominous as an iron fist, an image out of a medieval film, enters to twist water pipes as if they were pipe cleaners.
“Greed and tyranny wielding the mailed fist of oppression have moved against the people of the soil,” the narrator intones. “And when this happens, the green of the plants is touched by the brown and searing hand of death. The fabric of Nature withers, desolation replaces abundance, ruin descends upon the earth.”
The film returns to an Edenic paradise, a bountiful Fallbrook tilled by virtuous farmers as towheaded children play with tame rabbits.
“It was a good life in a good land,” the narrator says.
To ominous music, the government's lawsuit arrives. Also named as defendants are the distant Palomar Observatory and the local pioneer cemetery, “the sacred home of the dead.” A church is served as well. “Not even the House of God escaped.”
His town paralyzed by fear, a rancher writes a letter to the editor of the Los Angeles Times. The plea for help makes it way to the desk of the editor, who gives it to the city editor, who gives it to a reporter. The Times story is picked up by Reader's Digest and The Saturday Evening Post.
State legislators and congressmen learn of poor Fallbrook's plight and come to the rescue. As the town celebrates its reprieve, the narrator surveys the bigger picture:
“Greater than the Fallbrook case, greater than the wrongs inflicted on the farmers of Santa Margarita, the fundamental question: Which way of life is to prevail in the United States? Shall it be the Evil One? Are Americans to be ruled in fear of the mailed fist of tyranny. Are non-elected usurpers of power in Washington to prevail against the American people? Is liberty to die? Is freedom to become but a memory?
“Or is Fallbrook to lead with its courage, its humanity and its strength in a mighty rebirth of the real American way, the way of Washington, Jefferson and Lincoln? 'The Fallbrook Story' has given the answer. The mailed fist can be trampled in the dust by the onward marching force of the people themselves, enlightened and informed by the free press and acting through their elected representatives in Washington.”
In the film's final frames, a farmer's boot stomps on the iron fist, burying it in the fertile soil.
Nearly 60 years later, a rubber dam – technically called a weir – could tame the county's last wild river, possibly ending one of the weirder water disputes in a Western region flooded with them.
Thanks to the Fallbrook Public Utility District for lending me a copy of the film.
Logan Jenkins: (760) 737-7555; logan.jenkins@uniontrib.com.
