The City (1939 film)

Summary

The film follows a historical sequence and uses the following locations:

1. In the Beginning – New England (a rural 18th-century community)
2. The Industrial City – City of Smoke (Pittsburgh)
3. The Metropolis – Men into Steel (Manhattan)
4. The Highway – The Endless City (Sunday traffic congestion in New York and New Jersey)
5. The Green City (Greenbelt, Maryland, and Radburn, New Jersey)

Greenbelt, Maryland, had been constructed a few years earlier as a New Deal project.

Production

The film was the idea of Catherine Bauer, an urban planner and public housing advocate. It was produced for the American Institute of Planners (predecessor of the APA) to be shown at the 1939 New York World's Fair as part of the "City of Tomorrow" exhibit. Bauer's original idea was to commission a full-scale mini neighborhood on a 10-acre (4.0 ha) site to showcase innovative housing design and community planning. This was to be done in conjunction with MoMA. When the plan was dropped for lack of time and resources, Bauer came up with the idea of the film. Robert Kohn agreed and commissioned it. At the end of 1937, Henwar Rodakiewicz moved to New York to assist Steiner in the production, including participating in writing and editing.

Soundtrack

The score was written by Aaron Copland, which he set for narrator and orchestra. It was conducted by Max Goberman. The narrator was the New York stage and Hollywood film actor Morris Carnovsky. Writing in the New York Times in 2000, Anthony Tommasini described the score as "by turns beguiling and trenchant."

Legacy

The film was well received when shown at the fair. One study of the fair summarized its reception:

The documentary was idealistic, framed with a Ruskinian tragic view of technological modernity in which the early 20th-century industrial city became a wasteland of dehumanizing machines, environmental pollution, and anonymous masses. Critics interpreted the film as a panacea for the unhygenic growth of the modern city, as well as the small but influential Regional Planners of America's promotion of a pastoralist greenbelt idea. The good life could be ensured not by wholesale mechanization, automobiles, and sprawling infrastructures, but by restoring to modern city life a semblance of healthy living and social wellbeing associated with Ebenezer Howard-style community-based garden cities.

In 1998, The City was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

The planned community envisioned in the film, with its attention to scale and shared green space, is sometimes confused by later viewers as representative of suburban development, which was not envisioned when the film was made.