The Town is a 1943 American documentary film whose subject is the Midwestern town of Madison, Indiana. Endorsed by the United States Office of War Information, which oversaw propaganda during World War II, the 11-minute film presents Madison “as the model American town where citizens embodied American ideals and values.” Filmed by the acclaimed Hollywood director Josef von Sternberg, the camera showcases the people of Madison – many of whom were European immigrants – in their “public libraries, corner drugstores, schoolhouses and public swimming pools.” The Town was created as part of The American Scene series and “shown overseas to remind troops what they were fighting to preserve and to demonstrate American cultural values to foreigners. It was translated into 32 languages.” The Academy Film Archive preserved The Town in 2012. The film is part of the Academy War Film Collection, one of the largest collections of World War II era short films held outside government archives.
Theme
Sternberg's portrait of Madison, Indiana in the sun-drenched summer of 1943 serves to artistically unite the Old World influences brought by European immigrants with the “progressive social and political ideas of the New World.” Sternberg opens the documentary show-casing “an Italian campanile, a palladian portico, a Renaissance fountain” as if these were features from a European travelogue. The audience is disabused of that impression when a narrator identifies the structures as the functional and egalitarian architecture of a small Mid-western community: “the fountain belongs tothe localswimming pool, a courthouse, the portico to a courthouse and the campanile is the Madison Fire Brigade bell-tower.” The citizenry of Madison, some identifiable ethnically as Austrian, Greek, Swedish and French are all active in work and social life. Employing tracking and dissolve shots, Sternberg's camera explores the social institutions in town and country, urban and rural, as well as quiet and secure suburban streets and homes. Commenting on Sternberg's approach to his wartime assignment, film criticJohn Baxter writes:
