“The interpretation of Chicago was at stake at this moment.”
That’s Northwestern University professor Michael Metzger talking about the 1961 made-for-TV documentary “Chicago: First Impressions of a Great American City,” which would ultimately be suppressed and virtually unseen — until now — because of its warts-and-all portrayal of the city.
Mayor Richard J. Daley called it a “monstrosity” and threatened to punch whoever was responsible for it. One newspaper report described it as a “libel on the metropolis of the Midwest” and ABC President of News James Hagerty recommended that it be “filed and forgotten,” despite acknowledging that “I have not seen the film,” basing his opinion on “the report of men whose judgement I trust in such matters.”
“Seamy” is a word that comes up in multiple articles about the film from 1961, including one from the Tribune that describes its focus on “skid row, a narcotics raid, honkey-tonks, cheap rooming houses and the slaughter of animals in the stock yards.”
For Metzger, this was a jackpot.
“Rarely do I encounter documentaries that generate that kind of visceral and vituperative response. This is doing the things I really want to see documentaries do, which is pushing people’s buttons and putting forward a personal view that might ruffle feathers.”
Made by a British filmmaker named Denis Mitchell, it was a co-production of the BBC and Chicago’s local ABC affiliate (then operating under the call letters WBKB), but it became a cinematic obscurity before it could be broadcast stateside.
Now, more than half a century later, the film has been unearthed and will screen at Northwestern’s Block Cinema on Nov. 5.
Metzger was unaware of the film’s existence until a year or so ago, when he came across the title while reading a text about the history of documentary films. “It was completely off my radar. And as soon as I encounter something like that, I want to see it. And that proved to be a bit of a challenge.” (There’s a less-than-pristine version of it on YouTube.) He ended up licensing a copy from the BBC for the upcoming screening.
Shot in black-and-white, the camera functions as a roving observer, when the technology suddenly allowed for portable, handheld cameras. Behind the scenes, Chicago historian and media personality Studs Terkel played an integral role, acting as a guide for Mitchell. (The Nov. 5 event will also include a screening of the documentary “Studs Terkel: At Home on the Air.”)
Mitchell’s career began at BBC radio, where he would “go out and just capture people’s stories,” said Metzger. He eventually started making films for the BBC and developed an impressionistic, non-narrative way of depicting urban life.
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“That’s what put him on the map internationally and that’s how Sterling ‘Red’ Quinlan, who was a TV executive in Chicago, would invite Denis Mitchell to come and make this film for the Chicago ABC station in a co-production with the BBC. He really recognized that Mitchell, as a filmmaker, was onto something.”
The film itself is non-linear and does not have a voiceover, both of which were unusual choices for the time. “Instead, the film relies on recordings that he made of everyday people in the city. There are some luminaries as well, but you’re never really told who’s speaking on the soundtrack. And it’s cutting abruptly between cultural events like poetry readings and vaudeville performances to scenes of door-to-door salesmen or car salesmen trying to hawk their wares. There’s no clear structure in how it’s brought together.”
Though kaleidoscopic in nature — a series of snapshot impressions — the documentary has a point of view it’s asserting.
“The filmmaker is often exaggerating the contradictions in the city,” said Metzger, “jumping from the haves to the have-nots, bringing us to the Playboy penthouse and then taking us to a crime scene. It creates this wry, sort of detached approach, but at the same time it’s trying to throw its arms around everything in the city.
“It’s driven by this powerfully contrapuntal way of taking us across these differences, and because of that, sometimes it cuts in ways that are a sledgehammer to the face. I think that’s what led people to respond powerfully to it, both positively and negatively, because it really was an unprecedented way of showing a city, both immersive but also provocative.”
Terkel’s influence was to point Mitchell to areas of Chicago that “weren’t just the parts Mayor Daley would have wanted to showcase. And Terkel understood this was a city of diverse populations and where there’s no one central economy or industry, so the film takes you from the stockyards to corporate spaces.”
The documentary premiered on the BBC first, which is how American embassy workers and journalists based in the UK got a look at the film — and started grumbling.
“The Tribune and other papers in the city had foreign correspondents there who were reporting on the film,” said Metzger,” and I don’t want to say they were exaggerating, but they were honing in on the more negative dimensions of the city that appear in the film and reporting on what they saw as a distorted point of view of Chicago. One of my favorite headlines is: ‘Embassy boils at savage dishonesty.’”
A Tribune report notes that “many Englishmen who know Chicago are as angry as citizens here about the seamy-sided portrayal of this city,” so much so, they were compelled to write to Daley ‘expressing sympathy to Chicago and distaste for the unfairness of the film.’” Another piece in the Tribune reports that a local advertising executive was planning a trip to London to “correct the false image of Chicago” presented in the film.
There was considerable (and ultimately successful) pressure to bury the film. “Daley was quite vocal about his displeasure.”
Quinlan was still a believer, though, and months later he would organize small, private screenings of the film. Tribune columnist Frances Coughlin was among the invited and she had a far less alarmed response to the film’s depiction:
“To spread this observer’s cards on the table, the film ‘Chicago’ is by turns tender, brutal, lyric, evil, ironic and imaginative — and, in consequence, a highly impressive documentary.”
The film became a symbol of insecurities and anxieties about Chicago’s image, which persist to this day. Ultimately, “It was illustrative to see what people wanted Chicago to look like on screen versus what someone from outside the city saw in it,” said Metzger.
Eventually, the documentary was broadcast on TV five years later on WFLD, when it was a UHF channel. “I don’t think it made much of an impression, and that may be because it aired on a much smaller channel.”
After that, the film more or less disappeared, though Terkel would bring it up often “and reverentially, talking about the misfortune of the controversy around it,” said Metzger. “The thing that was so crazy to me was that after 1966, I didn’t find a single instance of this film being exhibited in the city. The memory of this film is surprisingly thin and I realized, wow, the suppression campaign really worked.”
Until now.
“That’s why I’m so excited to share the film,” Metzger said. “Mitchell’s curiosity and Terkel’s guidance produce something that is quite broad, so you get footage from the Gate of Horn, which was a really important folk music club, you get Maxwell Street — a lot of things that aren’t around anymore, so there is this lost Chicago dimension to it.
“I’m very interested to hear from our audience about how they see this film as part of a history of Chicago struggling with its depiction and some of these more popular myths about the city.”
If you go
The “Listening to Chicago” event with a screening of “Chicago: First Impressions of a Great American City” will be 7 p.m. Nov. 5 at Block Museum of Art, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston; free, more at blockmuseum.northwestern.edu