(1940, b/w) Eschewing the stark stage of a few props in the original play for a naturalistic setting and transforming the darker concluding act into a dream and a new life, the playwright Thornton Wilder with screenwriters Frank Craven (in the role of the narrator) and Harry Chantlee revised the story of a small American town at the center of the universe somewhat for the film, directed by Sam Wood with score from Aaron Copland.

In the first of three days, June 7th, 1901, in Grover's Corners, NH - a town of 2,642 souls, as Prof Willard informs us, with another 507 in the postal district - the narrator sets the scene where Mrs Julia Gibbs (Fay Bainter) calls to her two children, George (William Holden) and Rebecca (Ruth Toby), to come down for breakfast as Doc Gibbs (Thomas Mitchell) arrives home after delivering twins to a Polish mother "in a cottage over by the tracks." Next door similarly Mrs Myrtle Webb (Beulah Bondi) calls up to her two children, Emily (Martha Scott) and Wally (Douglas Gardner), for them to come down for their meal before heading off to school.

The narrator requests from Emily's father, Charles Webb (Guy Kibbee), editor of the newspaper, a social and political report: "Well … I don't have to tell you that we're run here by a Board of Selectmen. - All males vote at the age of twenty-one. Women vote indirect. We're lower middle class: sprinkling of professional men … ten per cent illiterate laborers. Politically, we're eight-six per cent Republicans; six per cent Democrats; four per cent Socialists; rest, indifferent. Religiously, we're eighty-five per cent Protestants; twelve per cent Catholics; rest, indifferent."

Emily, a standout student proud of having a good memory, asks her mother if she's pretty enough to attract attention. Mrs Webb replies: "You're pretty enough for all practical purposes." Academically challenged (asking Emily for hints to solve his homework in math), George at 17 is the town's best baseball player with an ambition to become a farmer; he'll eventually taking over his uncle Luke's acreage. His father tactfully shames him for leaving his mother to do the chore of chopping wood early in the morning.

When Julia returns in the evening from choir practice, complaining to her husband of the church organist Simon Stimson's intoxication, Doc says of the musician: "Some people just ain't made for small-town life."

Upstairs Rebecca tells her brother of a letter Jane Crofut received from her minister: "He wrote Jane a letter and on the envelope the address was like this: It said: Jane Crofut; The Crofut Farm; Grover's Corners; Sutton County; New Hampshire; United States of America." George interrupts: "What's funny about that?" Rebecca continues: "But listen, it's not finished: the United States of America; Continent of North America; Western Hemisphere; the Earth; the Solar System; the Universe; the Mind of God - that's what it said on the envelope."

Three years later - notice how Howie Newsome (Stuart Erwin) delivers milk from his horse-drawn dairy wagon in bottles here after previously pouring from a jug into a metal measuring device - on July 7th, 1904, "just after High School Commencement," George and Emily are getting married. "Almost everybody in the world gets married," intones the narrator: "You know what I mean?"

Bounding across the way to the Webbs' home, George is informed by Mrs Webb that he can't see Emily before the wedding. Sitting down at the table with his soon-to-be father-in-law, the bridegroom hears the advice Charles's father delivered to him before wedding Myrtle: "So I took the opposite of my father's advice and I've been happy ever since. And let that be a lesson to you, George, never to ask advice on personal matters."

The narrator then, taking the part of Mr Morgan at the drugstore serving the couple ice-cream sodas, shares a scene from the day when Emily and George ("I think that once you've found a person that you're very fond of . . . I mean a person who's fond of you, too, and likes you enough to be interested in your character. . . . Well, I think that's just as important as college is, and even more so. That's what I think") realize how much they mean to each other. Just prior to the ceremony, both bride and groom experience anxious flickering doubts of exiting their childhood.

Atop a hill in the cemetery in the summer of 1913, the narrator again surveys the scene with the graves of Julia Gibbs, Simon Stimson, and Wally Webb: "Yes, beautiful spot up here … Now there are some things we all know, but we don't take'm out and look at'm very often. We all know that something is eternal."

Down in the town - Howie's driving an automobile to deliver milk - Emily's having a difficult delivery of her second child; she and George already have a six-year-old son. In a delirium, she imagines dying and being taken to her grave where she has a reunion with her mother-in-law and others awaiting what's to come. Realizing that she can relive her life through her memories, though others advise her against doing so, Emily returns to her 16th birthday.

I recommend the 1977 made-for-TV production, directed by George Schaefer, with Hal Holbrook, Ned Beatty, Sada Thompson, Barbara Bel Geddes, Glynnis O'Connor, and Robby Benson.

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