The documentary, depicting the American Midwestern city of Madison, Indiana was filmed by Josef von Sternberg in 1943 and released in 1945.
[4] 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.”[5] 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 to the local swimming 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.
[6] Commenting on Sternberg's approach to his wartime assignment, film critic John Baxter writes: ”The Town is a work of a happy man, reacting without bitterness to a project considerably beneath his own abilities.”[7]