Editing Kings Row (section)

==Themes==
Bellaman, a professor at [[Vassar College]], was a disciple of [[Honoré de Balzac]]. His novel was in the tradition of ''[[Winesburg, Ohio (novel)|Winesburg, Ohio]]'' and was a forerunner of the popular 1950s novel ''[[Peyton Place (novel)|Peyton Place]]''.<ref name='Friedrich'>{{cite book | last = Friedrich | first = Otto | title = City of nets: a portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s | publisher = University of California Press (reprint) | year = 1997 | pages = 86–89 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=1Y9uZw7YNK8C| isbn = 978-0-520-20949-7 }}</ref>

The film begins with a billboard promoting Kings Row as "A Good Town. A Good, Clean Town. A Good Town to Live In and a Good Place to Raise Your Children." In his book ''City of Nets'', author Otto Friedrich says that beneath the tranquil, small-town exterior was a "roiling inferno of fraud, corruption, treachery, hypocrisy, class warfare and ill-suppressed sex of all varieties: adultery, sadism, homosexuality, incest."<ref name='Friedrich'/>

The film is a eulogy for American small town life in the Victorian era. At one point a character laments at seeing Parris' grandmother getting older: "A whole way of life. A way of gentleness and honor and dignity. These things are going... and they may never come back to this world."<ref name='TCMarticle'>{{cite web|url=https://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title/76862/great-expectations#articles-reviews?articleId=212765 |title=Kings Row |access-date=November 16, 2022 |last=Wood |first=Brett |work=TCM website |publisher=Turner Classic Movies }}</ref>