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Great Performances: Our Town (1989)
The Best Version of This Play
Until I saw this version of Our Town I did not really understand the power of Thorton Wilder's play. This version contains real people and not characters lifted from cloying greeting cards. The cast is excellent. When Dr. Gibbs dresses down his son for ignoring the chores, we understand why George cries. We see unstated confusion and conflict between the doctor and his son regarding his mother and then marital tension, loving tension, between the Gibbs when the mother comes home. Penelope Ann Miller elicits the pathos of seeing the ones she loves who do not understand what she now understands about life. Spaulding Gray is quirky and purposefully detached from the characters of the play he is supervising. He is at his best when he lays out the town in the first act description. His use of his hands is excellent.
High Noon (1952)
Excellent movie despite the flaws
High Noon works because of its mythic story line. Will Kane is a man who must do the thing he must despite everyone who loves him and whom he loves aggressively trying to stop him from doing it. He is alone. He against difficult odds. He fully expects to die in his attempt, but he must continue with his mission. Often in the film characters are aware of the qualities that make Kane act as he does, but the characters can not put it into words. They essentially sum it up with a summation of "If you don't know, I can't explain it to you." It has to be so because the qualities that make human beings do the truly difficult things in life are ineffable.
The movie is not without flaws. The acting of the principals is terrible. Only Katy Turado as Helen Ramirez is at all believable. Gary Cooper is stilted, as always, and Grace Kelly is a pretty face. Despite the actors, the scenes and images are what carry the day. Who can forget the image of Will Kane alone on the street awaiting his doom? Or the view down the railroad tracks for the train that will bring destiny? Or the two women, one with a dark dress, dark skin and a dark past, and the other the very antithesis, riding past Kane on the street leaving him alone.
Also a drawback is the constant refrain of the ballad that seems to run through Kane's mind as if he, at some level, knows that part of what he must do is to become one of the legends of the West. The use of the song is partly redeemed when we last hear "Do not forsake me, O my darling," and we realize that it is his home that forsook him, not his bride after all.
High Noon (1952)
Excellent movie despite the flaws
High Noon works because of its mythic story line. Will Kane is a man who must do the thing he must despite everyone who loves him and whom he loves aggressively trying to stop him from doing it. He is alone. He against difficult odds. He fully expects to die in his attempt, but he must continue with his mission. Often in the film characters are aware of the qualities that make Kane act as he does, but the characters can not put it into words. They essentially sum it up with a summation of "If you don't know, I can't explain it to you." It has to be so because the qualities that make human beings do the truly difficult things in life are ineffable.
The movie is not without flaws. The acting of the principals is terrible. Only Katy Turado as Helen Ramirez is at all believable. Gary Cooper is stilted, as always, and Grace Kelly is a pretty face. Despite the actors, the scenes and images are what carry the day. Who can forget the image of Will Kane alone on the street awaiting his doom? Or the view down the railroad tracks for the train that will bring destiny? Or the two women, one with a dark dress, dark skin and a dark past, and the other the very antithesis, riding past Kane on the street leaving him alone.
Also a drawback is the constant refrain of the ballad that seems to run through Kane's mind as if he, at some level, knows that part of what he must do is to become one of the legends of the West. The use of the song is partly redeemed when we last hear "Do not forsake me, O my darling," and we realize that it is his home that forsook him, not his bride after all.