Our Town (1940)
Plot: The film is an adaptation of Thornton Wilder's Pulitzer Prize-winning play, set in the fictional, ordinary small town of Grover's Corners, New Hampshire, between 1901 and 1913. The story, narrated by the Stage Manager (Frank Craven), chronicles the daily lives, love, and loss experienced by the townspeople, focusing primarily on the two neighboring families, the Gibbses and the Webbs. It centers on the developing relationship between George Gibbs (William Holden) and Emily Webb (Martha Scott), who fall in love, marry, and begin a family. The final act of the story is famous for its metaphysical look at life and death. The film famously alters the play's ending: when Emily becomes desperately ill after the birth of her second child and encounters the spirits of the deceased, she eventually decides to return to the world and wakes from her near-death experience, allowing her to live.
