GManfred Nice approach to life in New England in the beginning of the 20th century. It is told from the viewpoint of one of it's inhabitants, who acts as the narrator throughout the movie. Adapted from a Broadway show, it tells of the coming of age of two teenage neighbors who grew up together and eventually marry. It has an attractive cast with a good supporting actors to flesh out the story, a simple and predictable tale of simple and predictable people.The story is perhaps too true to life, as it is unexciting and lacks a compelling scene or event to draw the viewer in. Pleasant and agreeable, but plodding and even-handed and somewhat overrated for my taste. But that's what moviegoing is all about. The star rating is in the heading. The website no longer prints mine.

writers_reign I read and enjoyed the play Our Town when I was in my teens and later I was lucky enough to see Alan Alda play the Stage Manager in London. I saw it twice, in fact. Until now I have never seen the film adaptation and on the plus side we get Frank Craven reprising the role of his life on screen but against that we also get to see a tangible town which is, of course, the ultimate irony. On stage Wilder was asking audiences to use their imagination and Frank Craven conjured up the town with just a sawhorse and a pair of stepladders. The thing is you can do that in a theatre but by definition film demands concrete images so that at one fell swoop half the magic is dissipated. There are, however, compensations by which I mean the cast and Wilder's deceptively simple poetic writing. Although I could have used a better print I will cherish the one I have.

SnoopyStyle Grovers Corners, New Hampshire is a small town. The stage manager describes the town and the story of the everyday people. There's a stage manager because this is from the Thornton Wilder play. It maintains its playlike narrative. It starts in 1901 and it's a bucolic scene. It's very much a Norman Rockwell existence. George and Emily are neighbors who finds each other endearing. Then she gets married, has kids, lives and dies.The movie delivers life that is very ordinary and very idealized. That's kind of the point. The point is to see a simple life although it does get very slow at times. The big thing is the third act. In the play, she dies and the audience learns to live everyday to the fullest. It's poignancy is somewhat lost by the fact that Emily has to come back to life in the movie. I've never found "It's all a dream" ever a good idea in a story. This one really strips some of the power from the ending. I wonder if she truly lives everyday to the fullest after the dream. It would be better if the movie tries to center on that point rather than forcing a happy ending.

Cinema_Fan Welcome to Our Town, welcome to your town? As we are introduced into the worlds of its townsfolk of 1901 America, this three act play is opened before us with the help of "The Stage Manager", a visual narrator if you like. After his initial introductions, we are led into the homes of two particular families; The Webb's and the Gibb's.This is most definitely middle America at the turn of the century, and the progressive way of life of the American Dream and its saccharine overtones that can seem a little biased in this dream town. Here we see the everyday lives of some of its 2642 populace of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, even if there are, too, the migrant Polish workers that add another 500 to is numbers, they, never get a look-in.Once the daily lives of these families have been introduced; wives cooking, children home-working, fathers working, kids falling in love and the clean picket-fences painted white, the second act is started three years later, after young George (a young and unrecognisable William Holden, then aged 22) and Emily have fallen in love and intend to marry. Blossoming lovebirds reaching for the stars and reaching, too, a turning point in their own lives, from the nest they lived and now, into the anxieties and woes of young adulthood they nervously step. The third act is slightly more sour and foreboding, it is in this act that the movies intentions become apparent, here we see not life, not celebration but death, and it is in this predicament that the dead, as they return to revisit and reconcile their own life past, are here to remind us, to tell us, that life, and every last minute, every precious breath is not to be wasted and squandered.It is in this last third that the movies own political stance also seems more apparent too, feeling more of a propaganda stunt on the moral lecturing on, and by, middle America and how it should direct its home and how it should also put it in order. This isn't just about "Our" town, this is moral diction aimed at "Our" souls and how America can better itself if its peoples', (excluding the Poles, the Irish, the Native American and the freed ethnic minorities', and minorities' in general, plus the supporting backbone of the Americana's who, still, have not had a fair part in this narrative), such as the middle classes, can live up to the expectations of the American Dream through honest, decent living. The purveyors of the American Dream with special invitation only.I was entertained, slightly, by this movie too, but I felt that its narrative held a stronger impact than anything else that took part in it albeit the bland acting, the musical score or how well, or not, it was made. This was the movies intention to exclude other groups, and to only include the likes of the Webb's and the Gibb's, in the future of the developing country of the USA, a good movie, but also a slightly biased in its stance, I thought.Taken from the play by US' born Thornton Wilder (1897 - 1975) this Pulitzer Prize winning play, and six Academy Award nominated movie, was the focal point on the perpetual motion of life and its three main attributes; Life, love and death, the plays translation onto celluloid comes across as a slightly to the right blurb of social consciousness. Our Town starts off with what seems a lesson in pointlessness, like other towns, nothing too exciting ever happens here, if anything at all, this town only has the "right sort of people", you can still leave your back-door unlocked here, we are seeing the developing lives of these two families, but it is their moral and social stance that is more important than them themselves. Our Town may just have been "Any Town", just as long as you came from the right part of town that is.