Our Town

Thorton Wilder’s play is an indomitable classic, a work that twisted and contorted the very fabric of stage dramatics during its time. So why is the movie version so damn underwhelming? It’s never terrible, but it mostly stalls out at serviceable. Maybe because it decides on largely being a filmed document of the play rather a cinematic adaptation of it. Or maybe it’s just because certain conceits work better on stage than in film – the narrator is never fully integrated into the plot, nor is the minimalism of the production design. Think of it either way, the point is, Our Town doesn’t ever work as a film.

Our Town is a led by Martha Scott, in her film debut, and William Holden, in one of his earliest roles. Scott was inexplicably Oscar nominated for her turn here, which is never truly great nor terrible, just merely workman-like. That she bested, say, Rosalind Russell in His Girl Friday for recognition is baffling. And Holden is awkward in these All-American boy-next-door parts, he soared once Billy Wilder got his hands on him. Everyone else does fine work, but I’ve seen all of them perform better in other films.

Artifice and sentimentality are the primary means of operation in Our Town. The main problem with this is simple: sentimentality in order to be effective must be earned, which Our Town never properly does. Artifice in a film, especially one from the studio era, is to be expected. Modern films don’t speak this romantic language as fluently. And Our Town’s insistence on giving the story a happy ending is baffling and confusing. The brilliance of the play was that the third act took such a sudden departure into the surreal and embraced darkness. The film only commits to this change halfway, which is a good enough summary for the film adaptation as a whole.