This is an amazing piece of propaganda masquerading as a public safety film. Produced by The Caterpillar Company and cynically dubbed a 'Caterpillar safety presentation', The Perfect Crime was designed to make John and Jane Motorist feel incredibly guilty about every fatal accident that occurs on America's highways. You see, there hasn't been enough investment in road-building, and people keep dying on those old crummy thoroughfares because John and Jane aren't willing to pay taxes to replace them. What the country needs is a blitzkrieg of bulldozers, and who better to provide them than Caterpillar? Directed by Robert Altman, The Perfect Crime displays little of the future auteur's attention to character, but did it sway Congress to approve the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1956, the legislation that created the Interstate highway system? It wouldn't surprise me at all if it did.

Unrelenting propaganda piece, excellently photographed and narrated. Was Robert Altman laughing, though, when he had his narrator speak the words "murder" and "death" about a hundred times, all to hammer home the idea that we need highway construction? The guys at Caterpillar, who sponsored this, must have swooned. Maybe side roads really WERE awful, but by the end of this, you want to shout "I get it!" I get it!" (The faked images of dead children are disturbing.) Anyway, an interesting artifact from the Eisenhower years. Some fun can be had by identifying cars. And as with all such glimpses, I always wonder where and when the sections were filmed.