Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day 106: Small Town Charm

After the Human Comedy set in the small town of Ithaca we return to small town life on the Oscar Challenge with Sam Wood's 1940 adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Our Town set in Grover's Corner, New Hampshire. In the early 1940s it seems that adapting plays to the screen still meant almost a scene for scene reconstruction of how they first played in the theatre. Like on the stage Our Town begins with the character of Stage Manager, here played by Frank Craven, who addresses the audience directly and introduces them to the characters and day-to-day activities in the small town. The film concentrates on two families - the Gibbs and the Webbs and in particular their two eldest children George Gibbs and Emily Webb played by William Holden and Martha Scott. You can kind of sense the film was a play to begin with as it seems to be divided into three acts the first with George and Emily's schooldays and their first attraction to each other, the second with them getting together properly and getting married and the final with Emily's death during childbirth and her appearing as a ghost looking back at her life. However some changes were made from the play when it became a film most notably is that Emily's death is just a dream in the film, something that didn't happen in Wilder's original work, presumably because Wood wanted the wartime audience to have a happy ending leaving the cinema on a high with Emily's words about really living still ringing in their heads.

Although as I previously stated there are some issues over the adaptation of the play in that it still feels quite stagy there are some nice touches most of them in the film's final act. Emily's presence as a ghost looking at her funeral is done very well she is shot with a bright light surrounding her wearing only white and as she is taken up to heaven, before waking up, the screen closes in around her so she is in black addressing the audience with her final speech. There are also some good scenes elsewhere the funeral itself with the camera focused on a lot of umbrellas at the grave is a nice touch and the wedding scene is also well done. But there are a few dodgy bits as well a scene at an ice cream parlour goes on far too long and also a scene during a choir rehearsal at a church seems misplaced. In terms of the acting I was surprised that the names that I recognised - Holden, Thomas Mitchell and Fay Bainter, didn't give memorable performances but instead it was Craven's Stage Manager and Scott's Emily who really made an impact during the film and Scott was rightly given a Best Actress nomination for her role losing out to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle, another film directed by Wood. Overall a quaint adaptation which suffers from filmic limitations but is given life by a great central performance from its lead actress.