‘The City’ (1939)
By: Dan Hill
Tags: USA, History, Cities, Urban Planning, Film

It’s fascinating to see how clear the future seemed to be back then. It transpired that suburbia was a very interesting form in many ways, of course, and also contributed to huge wealth creation, albeit unequally. But it was, and is, hardly the only possible urban solution, despite the certainty and confidence of this film, and the many others made at the time.

Either way, this is film is an fascinating social document in its own right, with quite amazing footage of ‘ low road’ industrial America in particular. The scenes of New York — edited together to look like a deathtrap — are like Berenice Abbot in motion, but these earlier shots of a smoky heavy industrial landscape are quite amazing (apparently Pittsburgh and Homestead, Pennsylvania, according to a comment below). They’re similar to contemporaneous shots of the outskirts of Manchester and the east end of Sheffield that I’m more familiar with.

The model suburban development portrayed in the film was Greenbelt (or Greenhills?), Maryland. What happened to it? How did that place shape up to the parallel development of New York, say? One always wonders what happened to the children in films like this — what became of them specifically? The camera holds their gaze several times, contrasting muddy scruffy urban urchins playing in sewers with bright smiling suburban kids, cycling and drawing. What stories lay in wait, for all these children?

So, New York we know about, but what happened to Greenbelt? The narrator closes with no doubt as to the future, and which direction to take.

“Have we vision, have we courage? Shall we build, and rebuild, our cities, clean again, close to the earth and open to the sky? … Order has come. Order and life together. We’ve got the skill — we’ve found the way. We built the cities. All that we know about machines and soils and raw materials and human ways of living is waiting. We can reproduce the pattern and better it a thousand times. It’s here! The new city. Ready to serve a better age. You and your children, the choice is yours.”

Here’s the official spiel:

“The Regional Planning Association of America’s plea for community chaotic cities and urban sprawl. Directors: Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke. Script: Henwar Rodakiewicz, from an outline by Pare Lorentz. Commentary written by Lewis Mumford. Narrator: Morris Carnovsky. Photography: Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke, Jules V.D. Bucher, Edward Anhalt, Roger Barlow and Rudolph Bretz. Editor: Theodore Lawrence. Music: Aaron Copland”

And as a comment says:

“Directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke (who later went on to craft ‘Choosing For Happiness’), and with a score by Aaron Copland, this is probably the closest thing to pure social propaganda ever produced in the U.S. The New England town of colonial times is depicted as a kind of Shangri-la, where there was “balance.” Contemporary life, on the other hand, is depicted as dirty, noisy and confusing, as we are shown dead trees and muddy children in Pittsburgh and Homestead, Pennsylvania; slum kids and frantic hustle-bustle in midtown Manhattan; and hopeless summer weekend congestion on Rt. 35 in New Jersey. Happily, “the age of rebuilding is here,” and as the film concludes we are whisked away to a New Deal “green city” of tomorrow (Greenbelt, Maryland), complete with happy white people and a laundromat. “Here, science serves the worker,” the narrator proclaims. “Just watch us grow. The scales won’t hold us soon!” Wasn’t that the problem in the first place?”

I’ve uploaded a version here, and it’s also available to stream and download in numerous formats (and in a public domain Creative Commons license) in two parts, from Archive.org: The City: Part I and The City: Part II