#747) The City (1939)

#747) The City (1939)

OR “The Very Model of a Modern Major Capital”

Directed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke

Written by Pare Lorentz (outline), Henwar Rodakiewicz (scenario), and Lewis Mumford (commentary)

Class of 1998

The Plot: While at the 1939 New York World’s Fair, be sure to visit the Science and Education building and catch a screening of “The City”; a look at the idyllic past, chaotic present, and potential return to idyllic future of city living. We begin with our simple, peaceful life in the country before the dawn of the industrial age. Suddenly our small towns and communities are invaded by steel mills and factories, and we move to the congested, hectic big cities for work, isolating ourselves through new technology and navigating the perils of the city streets. But there is hope for the future, a future with new cities out in the country, where modern conveniences like mass transit are built into the communities, and all neighborhoods are constructed with the comfort and well-being of its citizens in mind. A suburb, if you will. Brought to you by your friends at the American Institute of Planners.

Why It Matters: No superlatives for “The City” on its NFR write-up, but plenty of historical context because believe me this clip needs some set-up. An essay by Kyle Westphal is a more detailed, and at times critical, appraisal of the film’s creative tactics.

But Does It Really?: I seem to be in the “left leaning ‘30s propaganda” phase of the blog. “The City” is cast from a similar mold to “The River” and “The Plow That Broke the Plains”, but where those shorts were about preserving our nature, “The City” is about preserving ourselves. While the film is a bit heavy-handed and goes on too long for its own good, I enjoyed “The City” as a sort of alternate reality where America’s attempts to rebuild after the Depression weren’t hijacked by another world war. Thanks to the creativity of the film’s directors and writers; what could be a very dry subject for a movie becomes an emotional tone poem for change. While far from essential NFR viewing, I support “The City” being on this list, even if watching it skews closer to homework than entertainment.

Everybody Gets One: Like so many experimental filmmakers on this list, Ralph Steiner started off as a photographer. After joining the Film and Photo League in the late 1920s, Steiner made his first experimental film, 1929’s “H2O”. Throughout the 1930s, Steiner served as cinematographer on several liberal shorts and documentaries, including “The Plow That Broke the Plains” and “The River” for Pare Lorentz. It was around this time Steiner met Willard Van Dyke; another photographer turned filmmaker. The two were commissioned by Catherine Bauer of the American Institute of Planners (now the American Planning Association) to make a film for their “City of Tomorrow” exhibit at the 1939 New York World’s Fair.

Wow, That’s Dated: The model city at the end of the movie is Greenbelt, Maryland, one of three cooperative communities created by the Federal Government as part of the New Deal of the 1930s. Conceived by the expertly named Rexford Tugwell and settled in 1937, Greenbelt was built not only as a trial run of a new city model, but also to alleviate the housing shortage in nearby Washington D.C. and help create jobs for the area. It’s all well and good until you learn that Greenbelt was planned and designed as a White-only community. Why can’t we have nice things?

Seriously, Oscars?: No Oscar nomination for “The City”, but Willard Van Dyke would go on to receive a nod for the 1959 documentary short “Skyscraper” along with fellow NFR filmmaker Shirley Clarke.

Other notes

“The City” was funded largely by a $50,000 grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York (about $1.1 million today). How do you get to the Carnegie Corporation? Practice.
The opening credits are a murderer’s row of liberal ‘30s filmmakers. Steiner, Van Dyke, Pare Lorentz; if you’ve been following the NFR you know exactly what kind of film “The City” will be before it even starts. Side note: Willard Van Dyke should not be confused with Woodbridge “W. S.” Van Dyke, the Hollywood director known for “The Thin Man” and “San Francisco”. To the best of my knowledge, Willard was of no relation to “One-Take Woody”.
Another big name in the credits: composer Aaron Copland. “The City” was Copland’s first film score, and it’s very…Aaron Copland, I give it that. It has Copland’s trademark Americana sound; you just accept the music for what it represents: quiet farm life, noisy city life, etc. Later in the same year, Copland would compose his first score for a feature-length film: “Of Mice and Men”.
Our narrator is Morris Carnovsky, a stage actor known for his work with the Group Theater, a New York based theater company that produced many of Clifford Odets’ original plays. Carnovsky perfectly matches the varying tones of each section: calm and reassuring during the farm segments, faster and more intense during the city section, patriotic and persuasive during the Greenbelt finale. Carnovsky can be seen on-camera in three NFR entries: “The Life of Emile Zola”, “Cyrano de Bergerac”, and “Gun Crazy”.
Part of what elevates this film is its poetic writing. There’s a version of this film that’s a little more matter-of-factly, another run of the mill piece of propaganda, but this script keeps things interesting and engaging, if at times preachy and biased. The script of “The City” was written by Lewis Mumford, who wrote several books about urban planning and the effect of the Industrial age on humanity.
I keep using words like peaceful and idyllic to describe the film’s first act on the farm because that’s what they’re going for; they really hit you over the head with it. Side Note: I don’t know if I agree with this film’s belief that crafting things by hand wasn’t work but rather art. That just sounds like more work to me.
I enjoyed the brief town hall meeting scene because it reminded me of the similar scene in “Blazing Saddles”. “Howard Johnson is right!”
There is nothing subtle about “The City”. Everything increases as we reach the Industrial age, with factories popping up seemingly overnight, and residential neighborhoods becoming dilapidated shanties covered in smoke. There’s no two ways about it according to this movie: this kind of progress is bad for humanity.
I’m enjoying the cinematography, also credited to directors Steiner and Van Dyke. Not surprising at all that two acclaimed photographers know how to frame a movie for impactful storytelling.
Add “The City” to the list of NFR movies that feature kids playing in the streets of New York, this time in Queens, I believe. Ralph Steiner is currently the only NFR director with both a “Kids in New York Streets” movie and a “Staring at Water” movie. The man had range.
I don’t know why, but I was amused by the “Danger Congested Area” sign on the streets of New York. As if you need to warn people that New York is crowded. Coincidentally, “Danger Congested Area” is also how I describe my nose during allergy season.
As the film begins its extended commercial for cities like Greenbelt, I kept thinking, “Did they invent the suburbs?” Turns out yes and no. While the idea of residential suburbs outside a big city had been around for centuries in Europe, this was the first major attempt at one by the US government. As for our nation’s eventual move to suburbia, see “Legacy”.
There are a few different versions of “The City” available to view online. Everything I’ve read about the film states the runtime as about 40 minutes, but most online uploads of “The City” run about 30. It seems that most of the cuts between the 30- and 40-minute version are in the back half; You aren’t missing too much, just more examples of how great Greenbelt’s model community is. As always, I recommend the full, uncut version of “The City”, but be warned that the longest version I could find online is missing the opening credits.
Even the 30-minute version finds time for a little sexism, as this new way of living gives your wife more time away from the laundry room to focus on social activities with the other housewives. “A little gossip or a friendly hand [of cards] is good for the complexion.” Yeesh.
The final moments of “The City” include the hard sell, where we are told that the choice between our current, awful state of city living and a new, superior life in the country is ours. Unfortunately, history showed that this choice would be made for us by international factions, and the answer was “None of the above”.
If anyone needs me, I’ll be checking out the smoking robot at the Westinghouse exhibit.

Legacy

“The City” played at the New York World’s Fair in 1939 and 1940. After the fair, an edited version was released theatrically by MGM under the title “This Is Tomorrow”, followed by a decade of playing various local schools, churches, and film clubs across America.
Ralph Steiner took a break from filmmaking in the early 1940s but continued his photography career for the rest of his life, returning to filmmaking in the 1960s. Willard Van Dyke continued working in film and television, and in 1965 became the director of the Department of Film at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Coincidentally, both Steiner and Van Dyke died within six months of each other in 1986.
While the kind of cooperative communities depicted in “The City” never came to fruition on a nation-wide scale, this film did predict the unrelated suburban boom of the late 1940s/early 1950s, when WWII veterans got great deals on home ownership thanks to the G.I. Bill.
Greenbelt, Maryland still exists and has expanded beyond its original scope with a current population of about 24,000. The original 1937 section of town is now known as the Greenbelt Historic District and was named a historic landmark in 1997. Thankfully, modern Greenbelt is much more diverse than it was in the 1930s; according to the 2020 census, roughly 80% of Greenbelt’s population identify as an ethnicity or race other than White.