This is the story of how machines made a "boom" town with factories running at top speed, stores crowded with shoppers, money flowing freely - and of how more machines broke it. It considers the problem of capable men thrown out of good jobs because of high-speed machinery. It gives an idea of what it does to the spirit of a man and of the effect on a family. Finally it offers as one solution the constant training of adults to keep them abreast of new developments ready for new and better jobs.

Produced one year after Willard Van Dyke and Ralph Steiner's landmark film The City, this film once again pleads for audiences (and makers of public policy) to reconsider our familiar landscape not as a given but as a space reflecting conflicting social, economic and cultural interests. Funded by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Sloan was Chairman of General Motors Corporation) in an attempt to counter the negative effects of industrialization and automation, Valley Town shows the devastation visited on an unnamed city when its industrial base shrinks.

In a contemporary description, Valley Town is described as the story of "how machines made a 'boom' town with factories running at top speed, stores crowded with shoppers, money flowing freely and how machines broke it. It considers the problem of capable men thrown out of jobs because of high-speed machinery. It gives an idea of what it does to the spirit of a man and of the effect on a family. Finally, it offers as one solution the constant training of adults to keep them abreast of new developments ready for new and better jobs." Although the film suggests job training as a solution, it presents a strong picture of unemployment, showing few ways to alleviate it. The only solution seems to be new jobs arising out of the mobilization for World War II.

Temple University anthropologist Jay Ruby has called Valley Town "possibly the first postmodern film," and in fact its mix of genres goes well against the stream of American social documentary. The film even includes a sequence directly influenced by the work of playwright and poet Bertolt Brecht, a kind of sequence rarely found in American films Marc Blitzstein's Brechtian song by a woman who wonders how she will continue to feed her family. There's also a kind of prefiguring of Italian neorealism in the way Valley Town mobilizes actors to reconstruct sequences that read somewhere between documentary and fiction. The almost-final scene in which workers watch the demolition of smokestacks at the factory in which they once worked puts the boosterism and bluster of From Dawn to Sunset definitively to rest.