User reviews

With this film, I begin a retrospective of yet another favorite film-maker; by this time, Sternberg had been virtually ostracized by Hollywood – in fact, throughout the decade, he only notched up a couple of official credits…with the film under review being a documentary short lasting a mere 11 minutes! He managed to imbue the essentially mundane life of a small town in the American Midwest with great feeling for the place and its people. Following a history of the locale, highlighting the influx of different nations that led to a versatile architectural sense, we settle down to exploring the current customs. These are often quaint, sometimes unapologetic (such as a man who prefers to go fishing on Sundays rather than attend the traditional church services!), but always with an eye on the vital upkeep of Democracy – let us not forget WWII was still raging when this came out.

Here's a portrait of Madison Indiana. It's narrated by Myron McCormick, and directed by Josef von Sternberg, pretty far from his work with Marlene Dietrich, but still careful in selecting his images and favoring ornate compositions. It's one of a series called THE AMERICAN SCENE, and speaks about the melting pot, with people who come from all sorts of nations, but who get along peacefully and whose children may enjoy things like spaghetti, but also go to the same school as all the other children.

It's a simple and basic short subject, a portrait of a town that really doesn't exist. There's a word for this: aspirational. It's a good word.

Having just watched The Town in a movie theater -- which was how it was meant to be seen -- I have to say that it is an overpowering experience in 2019, capturing the essence of the best sides of the American character as it was understood up thru the 1940s. The elements of freedom and tolerance, and acceptance that seem to come so easy to the individuals being shown and profiled seem part of a long-departed reality, and may make this film feel even more idealized than it was intended to be 75 years ago. Adding to the soothing nature of the picture is the music, uncredited but almost certainly derived from Max Steiner's score for The Adventures of Mark Twain, with numerous instances of a repeat of the "Mark Twain" motif throughout. As handed down to us, this is a haunting artifact of our best impulses as a nation from World War II, and perhaps to an America that is now mostly lost to us.