the spectacular; the small rather than the large; the rural rather than the urban; the faulty rather than the perfect; the struggle rather the ease – so that our audience will see us against our real, not our glamorized, background.23
By suggesting that the “real” America was its ordinary, middle class, flawed, and struggling people living in rural areas, McClure laid the groundwork for films that would celebrate small towns and their inhabitants. While this statement echoed earlier comments, given in various venues, about the necessity of counteracting, or supplementing, other views of America that circulated worldwide, here McClure established the thematic line that the CAD would follow in the next few years’ productions, which focused on small towns, even when they were nominally depicting other issues, from the first amendment to women’s rights.
According to the memo, the Signal Corps’s procurement office handled contracts for screenplay writers and filmmakers, who would be asked to submit a “six‐ to seven‐page treatment on how they propose to treat a film on the subject.” If the CAD was interested in the proposal, they commissioned a script, and after it was accepted a contract went out to production companies, many of which were private firms that serviced the nontheatrical market. As stated earlier, this model of production was sharply different from that used by the OWI and other agencies, which did the work in house or took a more direct supervisory role over production. In the memo, McClure justified the need for each production, citing both demand from CAD staff in the occupied nations and the absence of similar films made by either private companies or other government agencies. Another limiting factor was technical – because color film could not be duplicated overseas, all films had to be in black and white – and a number of existing films were rejected for this reason.
Because the CAD sought to cover topics that were not addressed by other filmmakers, the list of films they sought represented an unlikely set of concerns. For example, in justifying the need for motion pictures on women and democracy, the memo noted that they needed one or more films that showed the “general attitude of comradeship and respect between American men and women, and the equality accorded women in America.” For its proposed six‐film series on the city, McClure echoed earlier government critiques of Hollywood:
Commercial films project chiefly the lush “play‐boy” groups – or the lower class “problem” groups. The real working middle class – the strength of our country – has no adequate film treatment.
Cities, such as Minneapolis, Winston Salem, Akron, would be used, not the large cities such as New York, San Francisco and others that have been covered in many ways in other films. Also, the life of the family will be tied into the main industry of that particular city.
Even though the CAD occasionally filmed in small cities such as Tulsa, Oklahoma, and suburban communities such as Yonkers, New York, these films tended to emphasize community life and the values associated with small towns rather than metropolitan aspirations.24 It is not surprising, then, that most of the films that made it through the CAD’s production process were set in small towns, even when the subject matter of the picture was not geographically defined.
Small‐Town Films
Although the CAD ramped up its production efforts by 1948, I have not been able to locate production records for individual titles. In part, this may be due to the fact that the films were produced by outside companies, and the scripts that are held by the National Archives and Records Administration served as adequate textual records for government purposes, which meant that no other records were kept. Further complicating matters was the tendency for other government agencies to later reclaim the CAD’s films as their own. NARA lists just 28 extant films in their records, along with another dozen production records of motion pictures that may no longer be extant. In what follows, I will focus on three films that were made in, and depict, small towns: A Town Solves a Problem (1950), made in Pittsfield, Vermont; Women and the Community (1950), made in Monroe, New York and Social Change in Democracy (1951), made in Biloxi, Mississippi. Although these films were made for different reasons, all are invested in portraying the small town not as just a pleasant setting for a picture, but as the essence of American democracy.
This message is made explicit in A Town Solves a Problem, which was filmed in Pittsfield, Vermont, in March 1950, and depicted the “town meeting” form of government used in New England as a model of democracy. Like other CAD films, A Town Solves a Problem was made by a private contractor, in this case James and Schwep, headed by director William James and screenwriter Charles Schwep. The New York firm had previously made films for the religious market, including several titles made in Japan, and James had worked previously for the International Film Foundation, which was founded by Julien Bryan, who produced the “Ohio Town” series discussed earlier. As a result, James, at least, was well versed in the kinds of audiences the CAD sought to reach. The film’s subject was chosen because the CAD believed that there were no films that adequately depicted the town meeting. In a letter from Patrick Belcher to Pittsford’s town archivist, he observes that:
there never has been a film that showed what a New England Town Meeting is. That is certainly our oldest form of government, here in the States, and it is one of most significant contributions to democratic action. Yet it had never been presented in a film. … But to just make a film about a Town Meeting, without giving it some dramatic story, would make a pretty dull film. So we turned to the minutes of the 1949 Meeting and discovered that right there, in Mr. Dopp’s own words, was a perfect outline for our story, and one that would have very real meaning to the Japanese audiences.25
According to this letter, the CAD had already ended its role as a film supplier for Germany and Korea, and thus the only audience for the Pittsford motion picture was to be found in Japan. Even so, the film was to have wide release there, with 35 mm prints screening in movie theaters, and 16 mm prints made available to “Unions, Women’s Clubs, school groups, etc.,” as well as local prefectures, who would lend the picture out to “all those little isolated farming communities which never see a Hollywood movie.” A copy of the film was also provided to the State Department, who, Belcher noted, might elect to distribute it worldwide and translate the narration into dozens of languages. However, Belcher feared that the “Pittsford Film may be too strictly an educational, how‐to‐do‐it film, for the State Dept. to use.” Finally, Belcher’s letter lamented that the film would probably not be seen in the United States, as the government did not want to compete with commercial producers of short films. Pittsford residents would have to be content with their film earning the town a global reputation, even while their fellow Americans would not even be aware that a movie was made of their town.
Although A Town Solves a Problem opens much like earlier small‐town films, with shots of the landscape and paeans to the village’s townspeople, the film is distinguished by the fact that it identifies both the town and its inhabitants by name, though in the latter case pseudonyms are used. Very quickly, the narrative focuses on two inhabitants, Mr. and Mrs. Croft – the janitor and teacher, respectively, at a community school. The voice‐of‐god narration moves effortlessly from describing the people and places depicted to an analysis of Pittsford’s political economy. For example, in a medium shot of Mrs. Croft sitting at an old desk while looking at a school supply catalog, the narrator observes, “today Mrs. Croft is going to order a new desk that she has long hoped for. The Superintendent of Schools has finally approved the purchase with funds which the townspeople voted for school improvements.” At the moment that the narrator says “funds,” the film cuts to a close‐up of Croft’s hand over the catalog itself, showing a picture of the new desk. In this way, the film associates the acquisition of new materials with financial support from the town’s inhabitants, a dynamic that sets up the remainder of the film’s narrative.
After
