NR | 1h 30m | Drama | 1940
Human life is meaningful only when it’s relational. Only by treasuring life’s moments in togetherness do birth, aging, and death become worthwhile. That’s the point of director Sam Wood’s film, “Our Town” (1940), inspired by Thornton Wilder’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play of the same name.
Like Wilder’s three-act play, Wood’s three-part film tells of humdrum life in a fictitious New Hampshire town, Grover’s Corners. Told through the voice and person of the narrator (Frank Craven), the first part is set in 1901 about daily life, the second, in 1904 is about love and marriage, and the third, in 1913 is about death and eternity.
But who’s living, loving, aging, and dying? One family is that of Dr. Frank Gibbs (Thomas Mitchell), his wife Julia (Fay Bainter), and their children, 17-year-old George (William Holden), and little Rebecca (Ruth Toby). Next door are Charles Webb (Guy Kibbee), his wife Myrtle (Beulah Bondi) and their children, teenage Emily (Martha Scott) and little Wally (Douglas Gardiner). Years later, Emily and George marry.
Scott bagged a Best Actress Oscar nomination for her role. Renowned on screen and stage as the actress who twice played the mother of Charlton Heston’s characters, and twice his wife, she’s nowhere as effervescent as she is here, as Emily. An impossibly young Holden shines, cleft chin all set to catapult him to stardom. George and Emily, breathlessly discovering their mutual love, are at once charming and funny.
As if magically, Wilder’s storytelling devices immerse themselves in and transcend the minutiae of small-town life. Wood transposes the God-like stage manager from Wilder’s theater set onto his film set as narrator.
The narrator seems to know everything about everybody, appears nearly everywhere, and crosses seemingly improbable time periods. Yet, he graciously allows guest-lecturer characters and the occasional member from the “audience” to hop in and out of the drama alongside principal characters, all regularly breaking the fourth wall. It’s as if his joy, as a creator-narrator breathing life into his characters, is best fulfilled when he’s co-creating their story; he briefly appears as a character himself.
‘Something Eternal’
On courtship, love, and marriage, Emily and George roundly rebuke the farce around sexual consent that’s fashionable in contemporary circles. They’re saying that obsessing with consent betrays a transactional attitude. Nursing their ice cream sodas, they are so in love with each other that neither needs to give or get explicit consent.When the time is right, they are confident that consent will be forthcoming and won’t need to be explicit. Unlike those pretending to not know where the boundaries are, or expecting others to draw boundaries for them, George and Emily draw those lines themselves, governed by their inner code of honor and restraint.
The playwright is saying to the audience that life isn’t the point. We are. If life was all that counted, it wouldn’t matter how we live or die; to exist, then not exist would suffice. But everything in between birth and death does matter. It’s why human beings are the crown of creation. Amid cemetery ruins testifying to human impermanence, the narrator, alive to the irony, declares, “There’s something eternal about every human being.”
Characters here challenge themselves to slow down enough to soak in life’s sweetness with gratitude, not entitlement. The narrator commends Mrs. Gibbs and Mrs. Webb. They have raised two children each and cooked three meals daily for some 25 years without taking a summer vacation or having a nervous breakdown.
Watch Doc Webb get his son to move beyond youthful preoccupation and help with household chores. Watch Myrtle get her daughter to see physical beauty as a gift, not a currency with which to manipulate or be manipulated. To them, victimhood isn’t virtue, it’s vice.
In her dream, finding the beauty of her past too wonderful, Emily cries, “I can’t bear it!” She laments as much to her beloved family as to the audience not to let life’s precious moments pass by to a point where, “We don’t have time to look at one another.” That’s Wilder critiquing habitual hurriedness that lulls us into looking past, or through, instead of at each other.
