This Hollywood feature should have been right down my street, being from the Golden Age, being based on a Thornton Wilder play and starring a very young William Holden, but it just failed to gather me into its town limits, being really just too saccharine to be true. I liked some of the devices used, even as I expect they owe their origins to the original theatrical production, like the use of the narrator, especially his first appearance when he almost casually foretells the deaths of characters we've barely even met and of course Martha Scott's Emily character's near-death experience which sees her communicate with the town's recently departed as she fights for her life. I understand the film's avowed celebration of small-town values and community, but really the film has no tension points at all to get worked up about. William Holden's dutiful teenage son takes an eternity to talk his girlfriend into accepting a proposal of marriage and Scott's later return from the dead is filled with so much golly-gosh incredulity and winsomeness that you almost couldn't care whether she makes it or not. The acting is all very dutiful and rounded with no-one standing out exceptionally, even Holden, almost unrecognisable as the safe and secure boy next door. I didn't get any sense at all that this was a representation of real-life with almost every character being cardboard-thin and their lives being painfully dull and boring. Our town, you wouldn't want to visit there, never mind live there.
