Emanuel Levy's Small Town America in Film explores the image of small town America on film from the beginning of the sound era in 1927 to 1991. Because "small-town America has been one of the few uniquely American symbols to be continuously preeminent," Levy believes that his analysis of more than eighty films would reveal what the "American cinema told its audiences about everyday life in small towns: work and public life; love and marriage, family and friendship; sex and leisure; politics and community life…. the goal is to demonstrate the prevalence of certain myths…in the treatment of small towns" (15).
Levy says that he will be comparing small-town films by theme as narratives and cultural texts; he does not succeed in creating a coherent, systematic examination of these films, however. There is some analysis of films, but it is far from systematic and anything but coherent. The bulk of Levy's study is occupied with detailed summaries of films about or set in small towns, and some discussion about how the film was received. It is a characteristic of the book that the summaries of the films are not always coherently written or systematically organized. The book becomes essentially a collection of descriptions of films that might have some kind of connection with small towns.
Other aspects of Levy's methodology become troublesome upon closer examination. Rather than analyze a random selection of small town films, Levy selects films that were popular as well as critically acclaimed, while intentionally leaving out all musicals and westerns. No objective criteria are used to select the films he chooses to analyze. These problems make Levy's goal of presenting a "comprehensive view of small towns in American cinema" seemingly impossible to achieve (27). The set of values that Levy uses to analyze small town films—individual versus community, stability versus change, sacred versus profane, community versus society, and integration versus isolation—are themes that could be used to view any American film regardless of place. Despite the general categories used, Levy claims that "the substance of these unit-ideas is not universal: their meanings change depending on the historical and ideological contexts in which they were generated" (24).
Despite the weaknesses of his work, Levy does manage to tease some conclusions from his incoherent mass of data. During the thirties, filmmakers used comedy in their portrayal of small-town life; in the forties, drama and war films; in the fifties and sixties, melodramas; in the seventies, horror films; and in the eighties, satire. As time progressed, filmmakers also changed their perception of small towns from protectors of American virtue to being virtually synonymous with cities as homes of corruption and disillusionment. These trends, though, are not clear progressions across time.
Levy has obviously spent a great deal of time reviewing the nearly one hundred films considered in this work, and the secondary sources used seem to be mostly adequate for his purposes. One weakness in his sources, though, is apparent if we consider the sociological works used. Levy says that he is using sociological theory in part to analyze the films; however, he reviews no sociological works published since 1980. Notwithstanding these limitations, Small-Town America in Film does contain information that would interest the most readers, if those readers did not mind becoming disappointed rather quickly with the squandered potential of the work.