the only individual listed in the film’s credits.12
Even though the film acknowledges that, in this snow globe of a town (which one can observe, but never change), Joseph and Anna are not welcomed by all, the narrator attempts to reconcile the differences between Joseph and Anna’s old life in Austria and their new one in the United States. For example, as Joseph and Anna play Mozart, the film cuts to a slow pan across the New England landscape, while the narrator notes that “our land is similar to their own, chopped into small one‐man, two‐man farms.” And after Joseph gains acceptance in the close‐knit community, he starts a job with a local book publisher, his previous profession. The end of the film returns to a crowd scene, this time a town meeting, with Joseph announcing that, having learned the value of community from his neighbors in Cummington, he is returning to his home country to help rebuild it. Here, Grayson suggests that American small towns are not permanent homes for immigrants but can provide models for how foreigners might improve their own communities.
In fact, although The Town, The Cummington Story, and many films like it shared a reverence for small‐town life, they were not particularly invested in promoting the towns they depicted as places welcoming to immigrants or people of color looking to resettle in the United States. Rather, they were an attempt by government filmmakers to connect with foreign audiences by presenting societies and landscapes that might be more familiar to people living in rural areas abroad than the cities that were more frequently depicted in Hollywood films. As the narrator asks in von Sternberg’s The Town, “Where is this town? Where you can find an old English tower, an Italian campanile, down the street a Gothic doorway?,” and proceeds to identify a half‐dozen national architectural styles that appear in the community. “Few,” he continues, “may have guessed that this is a town in the United States of America,” a message that argues against the distinctiveness of the United States (if only architecturally). And indeed, small towns were useful for the OWI because they served as a point of connection between rural sites across the United States, as well as between rural sites internationally. Moreover, they allowed for encounters between cultures and populations to be depicted in a space that was familiar to many viewers, regardless of their nationality. If urban imagery in film, at this moment, promoted national exceptionalism with depictions of skyscrapers and other symbols of modernity, rural images in small‐town films instead suggested partnerships between nations through the uniting lens of local values.13 When the Office of War Information was disbanded at the end of the war, films such as these, now orphaned, were ripe for adoption by other agencies.
Motion Pictures for Occupied Territories
After World War II ended, the US government found itself not simply communicating with other nations, but occupying several, with peacetime operations in, among others, Germany, Japan, Korea, Italy, and Austria. At this point, government films began emphasizing the United States’ distinctiveness, rather than its similarities with other nations, perhaps in recognition of the country’s new prominence on the global stage. Two years earlier, in 1943, the War Department had established a Civil Affairs Division (CAD), which was tasked with coordinating all nonmilitary operations in occupied nations, including cultural production and dissemination. Pare Lorentz, well known for his government film production in the 1930s, was selected to head this effort in 1945. Among the responsibilities of the CAD’s “reorientation branch” was the distribution of US‐approved motion pictures to theaters in occupied nations. While the exhibition of American movies in occupied Germany, Japan, and Austria has been the subject of many monographs and articles, there has been considerably less written about the production of the films screened in these countries.14 As Hiroshi Kitamura explains in his introduction to Screening Enlightenment, which focuses on Japan, this emphasis on the circulation of American cinema within occupied countries is part an effort to counter the “sender’s perspective” that marks much of the scholarship on Americanization and cultural imperialism in the post war period.15 By assuming that US interests were well‐defined and consistent regardless of whether a film was made by the government or a Hollywood producer, such studies neglect the extent to which production decisions, not just those related to distribution and exhibition, had considerable impact on the efficacy of propaganda. Government‐produced documentaries, in particular, have been neglected in these studies, perhaps because heavy‐handed attempts to control which Hollywood films were permitted to circulate in occupied countries was seen as a more pressing matter, particularly when such films were intended to counter the occupied nation’s own cinema.16
Leaving aside questions of cultural imperialism for the moment, it seems worth emphasizing the pragmatic questions involved in selecting and distributing films for millions of people. At first, the CAD relied on its existing catalog of pictures produced by the OWI and other agencies, along with those Hollywood films that met their standards and, more importantly, were made available to them by the motion picture industry.17 The task of assessing Hollywood films for ideological content proved difficult for the Army. As Susan Smulyan has noted, the Civil Information and Education (CIE) section of the CAD’s efforts in Japan “found the content of documentaries and newsreels easier to control and understand than the slippery ideology presented by commercial films.”18 For this reason, it is no surprise that the government invested considerable time in selecting, distributing, and even producing nonfiction films.
The CAD’s first proposed documentaries sought to cover a range of topics, from rural cooperatives to juvenile delinquency, the American university to the Columbia River Valley, but it is unclear how many of these were actually produced.19 Within a year, however, their focus narrowed. For fiscal year 1947, the CAD committed $1.7 million for the production of original documentaries that would “show how essential aspects of democracy work in the United States.”20 According to an article in Motion Picture Herald, the Army had produced just three documentaries in the previous year, and was now committed to making 52 documentaries, with half shot by the Army in Germany and Japan, and the other half “made on contract by independent producers on the coast.”21 The decision to rely on outside producers was likely guided by an awareness that the industry itself was no longer interested in deploying its considerable talents to help government film production, and the Army’s existing motion picture unit in the Signal Corps was more accustomed to training films and newsreels than the kind of films Civil Affairs wished to make. Several people who were affiliated with the CAD felt frustrated by the organization’s slow progress, including Lorentz, who left the organization in May 1947.22
A few months later, in late November 1947, Major General Robert McClure, who headed the CAD’s New York Field Office, sent a long memo to the CAD’s Washington‐based chief, General Daniel Noce, on the division’s documentary production plans. Having decided that they had had their fill of motion pictures on music and art, World War II, and international relations, the division targeted five categories of production. The first four all dealt explicitly with America – “Our Democracy,” “Our People,” “Our Land,” and “Our Industry” – while the fifth focused on “community resources.” In a policy statement that was included in the same memo, McClure argued:
Wherever possible, we should tell our story in terms of real, down‐to‐earth people. Foreign audiences know us as an industrial colossus, but not as a nation
