The "city" referred to in the title is Coventry, a city which had suffered severe damage during an air-raid in 1940. According to the film this event gave a new word to the English language, "to coventrate", meaning to destroy by bombing, although this word was not used much even during the war, and now seems to have passed out of use altogether; I have not, for example, heard of Aleppo being "coventrated" in any news reports about the Syrian civil war. (There was an equivalent German term, "koventrieren"; like most Nazi neologisms this has also passed out of use in modern German). We see some archive shots of the old pre-war Coventry; unlike many industrial cities it had preserved intact much of its mediaeval city centre, complete with timbered buildings.
This short documentary was made while the war was still being fought, but it is not really a propaganda film and concentrates less on the actual bombing than on plans for rebuilding the city once the war has been won. It opens with some striking footage of a steam train speeding towards Coventry. British documentarists of this period seemed to be fascinated by the railways; the GPO Film Unit's most famous film, "Night Mail", for example, is the story of a train journey. As with "Night Mail", the script for "A City Reborn" was written by a famous poet, in this case Dylan Thomas, although here Thomas sticks to prose whereas "Night Mail" featured a poem specially written by W H Auden and set to music by his friend Benjamin Britten.
Thomas seems to have wanted to avoid the "talking head" style of documentary, and introduced some fictitious characters, the most important of whom are Will, a soldier home on leave, and his fiancée Becky, and there is a lot of talk about what sort of home, and what sort of city, they can look forward to living in after the war has been won and they can get married. Although they are supposed to be natives of the city, neither Will nor Becky has a Coventry accent; he sounds more like a Cockney and she like a posh Home Counties girl. Midland accents, in fact, seem thin on the ground; perhaps in wartime the producers had to use whatever actors they could get, regardless of accent.
The film makes clear that post-war Britain will need lots of new homes, not just to replace those destroyed by bombing but also to replace the 19th century slums in which many people were still living in 1945. The town planners, however, are determined to avoid the mistakes of the twenties and thirties, a period when large areas of countryside were swallowed up by sprawling suburbs. (Thomas tactfully avoids mentioning that one of the causes of post-1918 suburban sprawl was the same desire to provide "homes fit for heroes" as prevailed in 1945). The modern British planning system was to be introduced two years later.
So what are the "homes fit for heroes" of the post-1945 era to look like? We see a model of the planned future Coventry, to be built in a bland, inoffensive low-level Modernist style with no high-rise buildings; the skyline was still to be dominated by the spires of the city's churches and Cathedral. (At this stage it seemed to be envisaged that the old Cathedral would be rebuilt, but in the event the Church of England, going through one of its periodic fits of trendiness, commissioned a new Modernist Coventry Cathedral, leaving the old one in ruins). The city centre was to be entirely pedestrianised, an aspiration later to be abandoned.
There is much talk of "prefabricated houses" as the wave of the future. (Oddly, the commonly-used abbreviation "prefab" is avoided). As one character puts it, "If cars can be built in factories, why not houses?" (A bit of a non-sequitur. One might as well ask "If houses can be built of brick, why not cars?") One old man, Arnold, expresses scepticism and a preference for traditional brick houses, but the film invites us to laugh at him as a reactionary old stick-in-the-mud. Arnold's opponents, however, do not seem very persuasive either. Their descriptions of prefabs make them seem very flimsy, and the film overlooks the fact that prefabs were intended as a temporary, stopgap measure, not a permanent solution to Britain's housing problems.
The film contains some attractive photography and some effective use of music, particularly Bach's famous "Toccata and Fugue". The modern attraction of films like this, however, is for the insights they give into British social history.
