Directed and Photographed by Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke
Written by Lewis Mumford and Pare Lorentz
Music by Aaron Copland
Narrated by Morris Carnovsky
. . .
"It's here. The new city. Ready to serve a better age. You and your children . . . the choice is yours."
. . .
Review by William D. Tucker.
The City is a film which celebrates a new kind of city that no one who has spent any amount of time in a real life city would recognize as an actual city. This new type of city is empty, spacy, and antiseptic, with no skyscrapers, no street food vendors, no graffitti, no racial diversity, no loud music, no people talking to themselves, no poverty, no passion, no struggle, no culture, no dreams beyond skin crawly fantasies of a perfectly white-washed orderliness. My understanding is that in its time The City was intended as an earnest vision of how to solve the economic inequalities of a society devastated by the Great Depression, and afflicted by unregulated industrial pollution and crowded slums full of impoverished workers. In 2023, The City comes across as an unconvincing crank's rant against cosmopolitanism gussied up with phony pseudoscientific prattle about clean, orderly living giving birth to clean, orderly hearts and minds. The corn is strong with this one. Get those RiffTrax guys to roast it, that could be something.
The City begins in an Edenic self-sufficient village of water wheels and metal workers, where everybody knows everybody else, and, one assumes, where everybody is in-breeding like crazy. Humans and their technologies are in perfect accord. But alas, the Fall From Grace is nigh! Behold the Satanic Mills of Industry and their attendant slums! The skyscrapers full of greedy bankers and day traders! The Sunday Drive of bumper locked traffic climaxing with an over the cliff car crash worthy of Toonces the Driving Cat! The noise and press of vast street crossing crowds supervised by uniformed police and regulated by flashing lights! The mechanized speed of city folk as they stuff their faces from the automated lunch counters! The horror! The horror . . . gives way to the Grand Solution: the Paradise Regained of Garden Cities . . . which the strident narration insists are not homogenized suburban enclaves even though they definitely look like shitty suburbs. The Heaven, the Heaven . . .
The narration is done in a style of quasi-poetic scientism which brooks no dissent. It reminded me, strangely, of Morpheus's monologues to Neo in The Matrix . . . especially if you imagine an alternate version wherein Morpheus is a deluded charismatic cult leader as opposed to a liberator. Think about it: the virtual cityscape in The Matrix has many of the negative qualities described by The City: the mechanistic regulation of human activity, the overbearing police presence, the rule by an insular power elite. The City's narration speaks of people having to become like frantically hustling intelligent machines in order to stay in the proverbial rat race. This idea of dehumanization is common to both The City and The Matrix. Both movies present the idea of escaping an illusory metropolis as leading to a larger freedom-a liberation from total mechanization.
Sure, The City makes some valid points. Cities, as we know them, are divided along fault lines of social inequality: racism, white supremacy, economic inequality, gender inequality-The City gestures towards this with its criticism of capitalist greed, authoritarian cops, and corporatism. But The City ignores the cultural richness of cosmopolitan existence, how proximity to others offers opportunities for artistic innovation as well as connection and community. The City evokes the alienation and anonymity of city life, which is a valid observation. Many who live in cities do feel isolated among the crowds. The fast pace of city life can be alienating, even depersonalizing. But The City's solution of a flattened, white-washed suburb is not even remotely convincing. It must surely have been ruthlessly heckled even during its premiere at the 1939 New York World's Fair.
The City . . . doesn't get cities.
