Our Town

Dir. Sam Wood. 1940, 90 mins. 35mm. With William Holden, Martha Scott. How to film Thornton Wilder’s homespun, bare-stage hymn to the ordinary? William Cameron Menzies answers: Go Gothic. The result is an exercise in looming faces, canted angles, and deep shadows—noir before noir. This soundstage world halfway between theater and cinema anticipates Welles’s Macbeth. The film alters the play’s ending, injects stream of consciousness musings, and even includes dialogue exchanges with the audience. Yet its resolute strangeness doesn’t muffle the poignancy of its heroine’s journey into death and her visit to her sixteenth birthday.

Tickets: $15 (Free for members at the Film Lover level and MoMI Kids Premium levels and above). Order tickets online. (Members may contact [email protected] with questions regarding online reservations.)

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