Sponsored Films

A Place to Live (1941)
Sponsor: Philadelphia Housing Association. Production Co.: Documentary Film Productions. Director/Producer: Irving Lerner. Writers: Muriel Rukeyser, David Forrest. Camera: Roger Barlow. Music: David Diamond, Max Goberman. Narrator: William Watts. Cast: Frieda N. Blank, William Kesselring.

Advocacy film sponsored by a citizens watchdog group dedicated to improving Philadelphia housing. In this documentary with dramatized scenes, a schoolboy walks home through slum alleys infested with rats to a squalid “bandbox” house (three stacked rooms). The family yearns for a healthier place to live. According to Educational Film Catalog, “No problem is solved but a suggestion or two is made. The film lays the foundation for an approach to a solution.”

Note: Nominated for an Academy Award for Best Documentary Short Subject in 1941. For background on the sponsor, see John F. Bauman, Public Housing, Race, and Renewal: Urban Planning in Philadelphia, 1920–1974 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

Resources
Educational Film Catalog (New York: H.W. Wilson Co., 1936–43), 96; Film Forum Review staff, “A Place to Live,” in Ideas on Film, ed. Cecile Starr (New York: Funk and Wagnalls, 1951), 205–6.