OUR TOWN

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 134, 16 January 1942, Page 10

OUR TOWN

(United Artists)

HE space on the left remains blank because none of the accustomed attitudes of our little man could correctly interpret my feelings about

Our Town. The nearest I might get to it would be to show him jumping up and down on the prostrate body of the vandal who ruthlessly cut some 4,000 feet out of the picture and thereby all but ruined @ masterpiece. I had read about Our Town in overseas papers, and when its local screening was at last announced I went to see it, at some inconvenience but with high hopes. After it had been running for an hour that seemed like only ten minutes it suddenly jumped forward, then stopped short in mid-air, and a slide announced that it was the interval and time for a well-known brand of ‘cigarette. Personally I felt more like seeking out and telling the barbarian responsible exactly what I thought of him. But I wonder how many others in the audience would have backed me up? Did they even realise that the film had been butchered to make a double-feature programme; or did they simply think "Well. that was a queer show, ending abruptly like that. Nothing much to it. Let’s hope the second feature’s better?"

That feeling that "there’s nothing much to it" would not be unnatural: it is, indeed, the essence of Our Town, which is simply the day-by-day record of the uneventful lives of the inhabitants of a small American town. Nothing, and yet in a sense everything. For these , people, for all their apparent Americanism, might as easily be the common people of almost any town in almost any part of the world, and their experiences are the humdrum yet all important material from which the lives of most of us are woven — getting up in the morning, having breakfast, going to school or to work, doing our lessons, growing up, falling in love, dying, having children, going to bed at night. That’s all, but depicted on the screen in an idiom that combines casualness with intimacy, arid is as near to folk-drama or folk-poetry as one can imagine on the screen. The fact that the film was made by Sam Wood (of Mr. Chips fame) from Thornton Wilder’s prize play should have meant something to the vandal with the scissors-but apparently didn’t. Who was he, f wonder? Certainly not the censor, for there could be nothing harmful to the war effort in showing us that the best things in life are simple, or that Americans are very much like ourselves. Probably it was some Philistine of the film world who perforce measures the quality of such films chiefly by the number of minutes they will fill in before the Interval. In spite of mutilation, the film-like the Venus de Milo or the frieze of the Parthenon — is still recognisable as a work of art, but so that you may the

better appreciate what you and I have missed, here are the opinions of three worthwhile overseas critics who were lucky enough to see Our Town in its original form: Time: "The picture is a cinema event." New Statesman and Nation: "Our Town is a film in a hundred. ... It succeeds in drawing out of common lives and surroundings an emphasis and texture of their own." C. A. Lejeune (London Observer): "Once in a long while there turns up

in the cinema a film that breaks all the rules. When this happens, thc result may be good or bad, but it is always an event. Sacha Guitry’s films are like that. Green Pastures was like that. Down Went Maginty was a little like that. Our Town is certainly like that. The film will startle all its audiences, delight some, exasperate others. It blandly overlooks all the conventions of time, space, and scriptwriting. . . . It will either appeal to you as one of the loveliest films you have ever seen, or one of the silliest. To me it seems like opening a window and letting the-sunshine into a dark room. It has a gentle philosophy of everyday goodness that I find most comforting. It knows and loves the little things of life, the common things -coffee, and bacon, sleep after a long day, the warmth of sunlight. It is so beautifully acted-and particularly by that flower-like creature, Martha Scott, who plays the girl Emily-that the human story shines through the most startling innovations of technique. An enchanting film I thought — but you must make up your own mind about it. Like music and the bitter scent of chrysanthemums, it is the sort of thing that invites the sharpest personal response." 2

After that, Mr. Man-With-the-Scissors, I could almost wish that you would cut yourself with them-only you were probably no more to blame than an apathetic public.