City of Children

City of Children (1949)

** (out of 4)

This seventy-second episode in John Nesbitt's Passing Parade series is one of the weaker entries I've seen. The film takes a look at Mooseheart, IL, a place where there's an entire city of children who are taught how to live life after being abandoned by their parents. This series has always been one of my favorites because it either recreates great drama or tells great stories that many people might not know about. This film doesn't do either because there isn't any drama and the actual story being told isn't all that entertaining. The movie is incredibly flat from start to finish because we get a lot of stock footage and Nesbitt's narration just isn't what it normally is. The entire film has a lazy feel to it and I found myself looking at the clock a couple times too many, which isn't normally the case with this series. This was the final entry in the series and it wasn't a good one to go out with.

This short subject, the last one in the Passing Parade series that John Nesbitt did for MGM concerns a town named Mooseheart, Illinois. It was founded by the Loyal Order of the Moose fraternity in 1913 and even today is still going strong 10 miles west of Chicago.

It's got some adult supervision the documentary wasn't terribly clear about that, still it's residents are primarily young people, orphans who the Moose have gathered from the various places where there is a Moose Lodge.

It was founded almost a decade before Father Frank Flanagan founded his Boys Town in Nebraska. It seems like a non-clerical version of same.

And its coed.

An interesting story despite the omissions.

The last THE PASSING PARADE produced and narrated by John Nesbitt for MGM is about the city of Mooseheart, a town built to give orphans not just enough food to eat, not just a place to live, but a home. It was conceived by the Loyal Order of the Moose as a home for members' widows and orphans and opened in 1913. Still located in Kane County, Illinois, it's still open and doing its good work.

Nesbitt had been doing The Passing Parade, not only for MGM, but as a radio feature, for a dozen years at this point. Given the decline in full-program movie theaters due to the onslaught of television, the production companies were cutting back. Louis B. Mayer was fighting for control of MGM, and ceasing to produce short subjects like these, allowing more than seventy episodes to serve the theaters, was seen as a good economy measure.

First I've seen this. It just played on TCM. Mooseheart is still going but far different than in this short. We moved there 9 years after this was filmed. Idyllic place for children