Ray Collins narrates this film about a valley town. Once it was a prosperous industrial town. However the even race between skilled labor and mechanization has been lost, and the factory is not just closing, it's being dismantled. In the middle of this, we get a Marc Blitztein oratario in which the affected people express their sense of hopelessness.
There's a lot of skill in this movie, and. The editing by Shoshona Sachi is excellent, as is the advanced and dissonant score by Blitzstein. At least I think it is; it was paid for by Alfred Sloan, CEO of General Motors, who didn't care for its seemingly pro-Union message when it was finished. The version we have today is not what was originally delivered.
