Neal Rubin

See Detroit through a rose-colored video, circa '65

Even if you started in the middle of this sales pitch for Detroit, you would quickly sense that it's an antique.

At the 8 minute, 5 second mark, for instance, there's a shot of what's now called the North American International Auto Show, and the model standing next to a car is wearing a fur stole. Also, the car is a Rambler.

"Mammoth Cobo Hall," the narrator says, "geared to conventions of every size, houses all kinds of national and regional events." At least he doesn't call it one of Detroit's jewels.

"Detroit is ever seeking the new way, the better way," he says at the 13:50 mark. "Detroit shares, indeed leads, in each forward stride today as it builds for an even more prosperous tomorrow."

The 18-minute film was created in 1965, when the city was trying to land the 1968 Summer Olympics that ultimately went to Mexico City. The narrator was Mayor Jerome Cavanagh.

Today, that job would go to Jeff Daniels or maybe David Alan Grier. The narrator job, that is. Entertainers are limited to seats on the city council.

As a host, Cavanagh is paralyzingly dull, but that's not what makes the film memorable. There are obvious, excruciating comparisons between the cities of 1965 and 2009, but that's not reason enough to post it, either.

"Detroit: City on the Move" is an amazing snapshot of what Detroit was, what it thought it was, and what it expected to be. "Where once lay the ugliness, the poverty and sickness of slums," Cavanagh says two years before the 1967 riot, "has been condemned and cleared."

Things were changing

Joel Stone is more familiar with Cavanagh from his childhood than he is from his studies. At 53, the curator of the Detroit Historical Society remembers him as friendly, unexciting and doomed.

"Boy, did he step in at the wrong time," Stone says. "He knew things were changing, but he didn't realize how fast or which direction."

Cavanagh was only 33 when he defeated incumbent mayor Louis Miriani, who would later be elected to the city council and later still go up the river for tax evasion. The new mayor had broad support among minority voters at a time when Detroit had 1.7 million residents and more than 30 percent of them were black.

Detroit, he says in the film, is "an exciting place to be, to live, to grow, to work shoulder to shoulder, regardless of national origin, color or creed." But during his two terms, from 1962-70, there were still lots of neighborhoods where those shoulders were all one color or the other.

"Detroit has earned an outstanding record in community relations," he claims at 11:11, but there's more value in what's not on the screen than in what's between the quotation marks. Except in the background in crowd shots, there's not one African American to be seen. The looting in '67 was more multi-racial than the promotional film about the city.

"The white folks thought they were doing a great job," Stone says, "but they forgot to ask the black folks."

In 1971, Cavanagh went back to being a lawyer. He ran for governor in 1974, but lost in the Democratic primary to Sander Levin, who lost to William Milliken.

That same year, Coleman Young was elected mayor of Detroit -- but that's a different movie.

nrubin@detnews.com (313) 222-1874