Produced by Alfred Higgins Productions with assistance from the University of Missouri-Columbia’s Academic Support Center Film Library, Keep America Beautiful, Inc., and Keep Los Angeles Beautiful, Inc., the 1963 short film A Land Betrayed examines the various ways people have spread the “cancer of ugliness” across America and offers call-to-action solutions to combat the nation-wide problem. The film opens with a scenic footage of natural landscapes (00:22), Yellowstone National Park’s Old Faithful (01:15), Chicago’s skyscrapers rising above the Chicago River (01:28), and Glacier National Park’s Going-to-the-Sun Road (02:14). The United States of America has so much beauty to offer, yet there is a fundamental problem with the rise of litter, vandalism and graffiti, decaying infrastructure, and the abandoning of property that all undermine America’s aesthetics. A “cancer of ugliness” has made its way across all the U.S., but is especially prominent in America’s cities (03:56). Litter is increasingly problematic, even in formally pristine places like Yellowstone National Park, where colorful geysers must be cleaned out regularly (04:38). Vandals deface glacial rock faces on Mt. Rainier (04:57), which is difficult to remove. Forests, waterfronts, and communities are suffering from these problems, but the solution is simple: people can come together and clean up. School children help out by picking up garbage (06:15), communities can start civic brigades, like the Salt Lake Tribune “Beautification Program” (06:38). Steps are being taken to clean up America, but it is just the beginning. The anti-litter organization Keep America Beautiful estimates that the cost of cleaning up trash is around $1 billion per year. Clean up, followed by creating green space, can restore America’s beauty. Private enterprises have started planting flowers, like on New York City’s Park Avenue (08:09). Efforts will not only help restore America’s beauty, but it will preserve existing beauty, like that of Yellowstone Falls in Yellowstone National Park (08:47). The final message is that people are the only ones who can make America ugly, but they are also the only ones who can restore and protect its beauty; the film then concludes with a number of scenes from America including Mt. Rushmore (09:36).
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