“This is Dallas, a towering tribute to man’s ability to raise beam on beam and stone on stone,” the narrator says at the beginning of the 1955 short Report to Dallas, which you can see embedded above from the city’s Vimeo channel.
It was produced by the Dallas Citizens Traffic Commission to “highlight the importance of engineering and traffic flow in the city,” according to city archivist John Slate, who introduces the film Turner Classic Movies-style for the city’s cable channel. I’m wondering whether Patrick Kennedy would laugh or cry to hear the film’s pronouncements about the needs of parking and one-way streets downtown.
It’s astonishing to view these old scenes of the city, especially the swarms of people moving about downtown (at a time when the population was about 750,000). Later we see two cops pulling a drunk driver from a car, and I can’t tell if it’s staged. It’s one of the few segments I could easily imagine getting the Mystery Science Theater 3000 treatment.
H/T to Wilonsky for pointing out this video, and a 1958 tribute to the Dallas Police called Shield Over Dallas. You can see that one below.
