Narrated with cool pity as a cautionary tale for the future of European cities, a profile of Los Angeles was aired on French TV in 1969 offering a bleak closeup of abandoned armchairs by the beach, smoke-filled machinery, famous landmarks and signs for air-conditioned strip clubs.

"A blue, flat city," Los Angeles is observed in captioned voiceover as an uncentered city "fractured into multiple working class areas that ignore each other," and inhabited "by individuals who live together but never meet."

It gets personal: "The people ... love to think that they live in the city of the future."

It gets obtuse: "But it is rather a city of the present incarnation of past times."

Then the big warning: "If you would like to know what the outskirts of Paris, London or even Moscow will soon look like..."

You can guess how that thought ends.

[h/t Le Franco File blog and L.A. Mag's Elina Shatkin]