the film proceeds to present its central “problem,” the fact that the students bring their lunches from home, rather than eating a “hot lunch” prepared at school. At this moment in the film, the narrator explains that hot lunches would lead to “healthier pupils” and “better classwork,” as medium shots of a dozen schoolchildren eating their homemade lunches are intercut with medium shots of Mr. and Mrs. Croft shaking their heads. Exterior shots of the Crofts leaving the school are paired with the narrator outlining the next steps for the “hot lunch” plan, including the recruitment of parents to assist with building local support for obtaining a kitchen and stove. As the film’s characters traipse across the snow, the narrator identifies the challenges ahead: raising taxes to pay for the purchase of a stove, or, perhaps, using existing funds, including those designated for a new desk, to help offset the cost. Following a meeting of the parent‐teacher association, which takes place in the classroom, the group reaches a decision to bring it to the upcoming town meeting.
The second half of the film takes place at the town meeting itself, which is presented by the narrator as a “get‐together, when [the townspeople] elect new offices and discuss problems of the town … finances, health, safety, the library, the schools and any other questions which anyone wishes to bring before his townspeople.” Several shots of an impressive two‐story brick building are followed by a series of interior shots of the auditorium, with the parent‐teacher association just one of many groups of citizens present to discuss town issues. As the narrator argues, “everyone welcomes a new problem put before the people,” so the hot lunch proposal is welcomed not on its merits, but rather for its capacity to generate debate. Despite the fact that the film depicts participatory democracy in action, the narrator, not the townspeople, vocalizes the perspectives of those in attendance. Anna McCarthy has argued that many mid‐century educational films and television programs presented “group discussion” as a model for governance, as it privileges the “democratic values of creativity, choice, and freedom,” as a counter to authoritarian tendencies.26 Given the purpose of the CAD films, it is not surprising to see A Town Solves a Problem adopt this strategy, even if the use of the narration undercuts the idea of individual expression. While CAD films used a narrator for pragmatic reasons – since these films were used in many countries, new narrations needed to be recorded in a variety of languages – such techniques meant that local voices were not heard.
After some discussion, the hot lunch program goes to a vote, and the participants decide in its favor. The film closes with a five shot sequence of the program in action – a medium shot of three women, including Mrs. Croft, serving bowls of hot soup, followed by a close‐up of the soup itself, followed by another medium shot of the schoolchildren eating soup, followed by a second shot of the women in the kitchen, and a second shot of the children eating soup. These images of the fruition of democratic action are accompanied by the narrator’s praise for the town’s capacity to analyze and resolve the challenges that face it, calling the decision a “gift of good health from the people of a town that can solve its own problems.” This image of warmth and companionship is a sharp contrast from that of the snowy plain that opens the film, a closing that is also very different from the small‐town films made by other agencies, which instead resolved their narratives with long shots of the local landscape. In this way, A Town Solves a Problem invites audiences to draw parallels with their own situation, even if the problems at hand, and the ways to resolve them, appear to be very different. That is, by deploying a structure in which problems are presented, debated, and addressed in a community setting, the film implies that issues of shelter and sustenance can be resolved internally, without the need for outside intervention. In this way, films such as A Town Solves a Problem may also have been intended to model how communities could address issues after the end of occupation, when foreign aid was no longer available.
One of a series of films about women in the United States, Women and the Community, made by RKO Pathe’s nontheatrical production unit, opens similarly to A Town Solves a Problem, with an aerial shot of Monroe, New York, a small town 60 miles northeast of New York City. Like A Town Solves a Problem, Women and the Community is intended to bring the viewer closer to a particular community, but its opening narration takes the opposite tack:
What is a community? To a pilot it is a cluster of buildings seen as the birds see them.
To the locomotive engineer it is another “stop on the line.” He knows it only as a station name on his schedule.
To city planners a community means an area on a map, where everything is laid out in orderly, geometric patterns.
To the garbage man it just means rubbish – and more rubbish.
As the narrator offers this list of possible frameworks one might use to interpret a community, a series of shots – train locomotives, city planners looking at a map, and, of course, a garbage man – underscore the validity of these possible interpretations. But the film settles on another way to see a community: through the eyes of a mailman, for whom the term “means familiar houses with well‐known numbers of them. And it means the people who live inside these homes.” In the next several shots we see the mailman visit the town’s grocer and dentist, a widow and senior citizens. The choice of the mailman and, by extension, the postal service to articulate the ties that bind a small community to its national government is a common trope in government documentary film; Harry Watt and Basil Wright’s 1936 Night Mail, produced by the UK’s General Post Office Film Unit, is the best‐known example. The CAD even made its own version of such a film, R.F.D. (1949) using as its title the abbreviation for Rural Free Delivery.
But Women and the Community is not interested in praising the virtues of the postal service. Rather, the film is invested in democracy itself, particularly the role women play in sustaining its local institutions. After commenting on the mailman’s rounds, the narrator returns to seeing the town as a representative of democracy:
Though the town is a small one like thousands of others that will never get into the headlines, important things happen here, too. At least the people who live in the town think so, and they are right. This is a special day. Elections are being held and the people are taking their place in line to vote.
Although the film takes place on Election Day, the narrator emphasizes the democratic process as a whole, arguing “the actual casting of the vote is an end result, not a ‘spur of the moment’ action.” The male narrator then turns his attention to the unpaid, and, in this case, female, labor of democracy itself, presenting the League of Women Voters’ work educating the public on civic matters. For example, in a scene in which women are calling registered voters, close‐up shots of lists of names are superimposed with medium shots of women making phone calls, as the narrator comments on the “tedious” work that the women find “worthwhile because it led to a more satisfactory community life.”
In the film’s second reel, the story shifts focus once again, this time to the use of private and public resources to provide services for schoolchildren, from recreation centers to educational films to hot lunches to dental visits. Although the film’s title suggests that its true subject is the important roles women play in civic and community life, Women and the Community is somewhat sly about making this point, as it presents the institutions of small‐town life first, and only then shows the role women play in sustaining them. Toward the end of the film, the narrator speculates on the future of a young girl. After running through various things women can do in small towns, from donating blood to joining a garden club, the narrator observes “whatever she does, as an interested and intelligent American woman, she will become part of the bloodstream of her community.” At the same time, the narrator argues that voting will be the “climax of her civic career,” as it allows her to “register her will as a self‐governing citizen.” The film ends with a shot of a closing of a curtain, in this case the one that wraps a voting booth. Unlike the pat story presented in A Town Solves A Problem, then, Women and the
