The City
(Ralph Steiner, Willard Van Dyke, US 1939, 44 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: George Eastman Museum, Rochester, NY
Sponsored by the American Institute of Planners (AIP), Ralph Steiner and Willard Van Dyke’s The City has a lot in common with two past Nitrate Picture Show shorts. Like Westinghouse with The Middleton Family at the New York World’s Fair (1939)—screened in 2023 at NPS—the AIP hoped to reach the largest possible audience by featuring a film at the 1939 exposition. (They well succeeded: in just one year, The City was seen by an estimated 44,932,978 fairgoers.) And like last year’s The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936), which raised the alarm about land misuse, The City has an urgent social message: our overgrown cities have become entirely unfit for living.
The creative forces behind The City and The Plow were also closely aligned. Pare Lorentz, The Plow’s credited director, provided The City’s original outline, and Steiner, along with filmmaker Leo Hurwitz and photographer Paul Strand, served as The Plow’s cinematographer. Steiner and Van Dyke had earlier been part of Frontier Films, a leftist filmmaking cooperative co-founded by Steiner, Hurwitz, and Strand.
Lorentz may have provided the outline, but the film’s sentiments belong to sociologist and philosopher Lewis Mumford, the longtime urban advocate who had come to regard city life as dehumanizing. Mumford’s modern “cities”—self-contained satellites between the green spaces—as a solution, and so did the AIP. As 1940s Greenbelt writer Shirley Abbott describes it, the city presents the “ideal” for the suburban village (Shirley, Spaceshapers): the abrupt city blocks of the fully industrialized metropolis—Pittsburgh, where granite hills and winding lanes are replaced by steep heaps and crowded asphalt. Finally, “the solution”: Greenbelt, Maryland, one of three new towns built by the Resettlement Administration (the New Deal agency behind The Plow That Broke the Plains). These “Greenbelt Towns” sought to restore a healthy balance among work, life, and the environment. But however worthy the film’s message, the medium undercuts it: “the problem,” with its jazzy rhythms and historicist narration, is easily the most exciting part of The City, especially when set against the antiseptic environs of the all-white (in all senses) “solution.”
This definitive original print is in very good condition, with no splices in the image area. Shrinkage runs at a relatively high 1.05%–1.15%.
– Ken Fox
L'affaire est dans le sac [It’s in the Bag]
(Pierre Prévert, France 1932, 55 min., 35mm nitrate)
Print source: Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY
Silly, yes, but ever so sly. Written by the celebrated poet and screenwriter Jacques Prévert, a leading light of Poetic Realism, and directed by his brother Pierre, It’s in the Bag may have more in common with the Marx Brothers than Marcel Carné. But there’s more to this farcical caper than meets our eyes. Shot in eight days at the Pathé-Natan Studios outside Paris, the film is largely the handiwork of the October Group, a far-left agitprop troupe. Several members, like founder Jean-Paul Le Chanois (billed as J.P. Dreyfus), who plays our milquetoast “hero,” appear in the film and would later have significant careers.
The plot is a spin on that O. Henry chestnut, The Ransom of Red Chief: a band of small-time con artists, who, running a hat shop by day (they sell what they have earlier stolen off the heads of their now-hatless customers), plot to kidnap the son of an elderly industrialist who made his fortune manufacturing blotter paper. (His daughter, meanwhile, is courted by an array of hilariously unsuitable suitors.) But when the kidnappers return to their lair, “what’s in the bag” is not the kid but the “Blotter Paper King” himself. Irritating, infantile, and delighted to have been kidnapped, the old man may be more trouble than he’s worth.
Had it been set in the US, It’s in the Bag might have received a warmer welcome from French audiences. As it was, the film nearly caused a riot when it first screened, and Pathé all but disowned it. Perhaps the film cut a little too close to the bone. Actor, writer, and filmmaker Jacques Brunius, who appears as Adrien, a proud nationalist and beret fetishist, would later speculate that French audiences saw themselves a little too clearly in “the odious or ridiculous figures on the screen.” More to the point, the film openly satirized the French far right. Those menacing details which today strike us as ironically prescient were in fact deliberate provocations: Adrien’s unhinged demand for a beret, the prototypically French headgear favored by fascists and interwar nationalists; the sleepwalker who can’t help but march with his arm outstretched in a Roman salute. Both are played for laughs, and both are harbingers of terrible things to come.
This rare surviving original print of excellent image quality has a particularly high splice count (109 in a 55-minute film) and a fairly high shrinkage rate of 1.23%.
– Ken Fox