ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the film Manhattan Medley directed by Bonney Powell. Powell's Manhattan Medley bills itself in an intertitle as "a camera conception of the city of inconceivable contrasts—a symphony of paradox." In doing so, Powell's Fox-Movietone production invokes the city symphonies phenomenon in general, as well as Irving Browning's City of Contrasts, which was released the same year, and Robert Flaherty's Twenty-four Dollar Island, which had called itself "a camera impression of New York," in its opening intertitle. The city symphonies style has become a kind of shorthand for the dynamics of the modern metropolis, one that was evidently considered particularly well suited to capturing New York City's "symphony of paradox." It's a film that features many of the hallmarks of the city symphony—in terms of structure, content, and technique—but the film is atypical in that it features much more of a tourist's vision of the city than one typically finds in these films.
