Young George Gibbs and Emily Webb are seated inside the local convenience store. They are methodically working their way through a pair of ice cream floats. George tells Emily he wants to be a farmer someday. Emily tells George she has plans of her own, too. Although they have been next-door neighbours all their lives (or indeed perhaps because of it), over the span of their conversation, the two achingly bring themselves to the cusp of giving into their true feelings for each other. The scene is well-written, ripe with fine timing and carefully chosen silences.
A lot of the film Our Town is like that. It glorifies and eulogizes a time in the United States that was wholesome and as American as apple pie. Every morning, for example, Howie Newsome (Stuart Erwin) delivers fresh milk to the homes in Grovers Corners, New Hampshire. Sometimes he even opens people's doors and walks right in. There's also weekly choir practice, led by the inebriated Simon Stimson (Philip Wood), which gives the townswomen their only scandalous subect to gossip about because basically everything else is so darn squeaky clean.
The heart of the story lies in the courtship between George and Emily though (William Holden and Martha Scott). George's father (Thomas Mitchell) is the town doctor, and Emily's father (Douglas Gardner) is the editor of the town paper. Thus, the people who are really taking note of their blossoming relationship are, naturally, their mothers (Fay Bainter and Beulah Bondi). Passages are conveyed and connected via the Stage Manager (Frank Craven), who divides the film into "A Day in the Life", "Love and Marriage", and, inevitably, death.
The original theatrical version of the play Our Town is set, essentially, on an empty stage, but the warm story and relative popularity of the show led it inevitably to this film version in 1940. The playwright Thornton Wilder was apparently not too impressed with director Sam Wood's interpretation of the story, particularly in a crucial decision to completely change a major character's fate at its conclusion. Purists will no doubt agree that Wood's liberty defeats one of Wilder's most fundamental points in the play, but the end result is still a cohesive, comic, and simple tale. Our Town may be dated in places (particularly in the acting department), but at least it successfully touches on those warm and fuzzy boundaries of familial nostalgia.
