This is part of a series of articles reviewing the American Film Institute's Top 100 Films, as unveiled in 2007. Why am I doing this? Because the damned cinemas were closed and I had to review something, and now I can't stop until I finish.
(G) ★★★★
Director: William Wyler.
Cast: Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Myrna Loy, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Harold Russell, Cathy O'Donnell, Hoagy Carmichael, Ray Collins.
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| "So strap on that there jammy pac, and get up off my floor..." |
It's amazing to think that almost 80 years after its release, this is still widely considered the best film about returning soldiers. "(It's) certainly the most moving and most deeply felt," writes Jonathan Rosenbaum in 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die, while The Wordsworth Book of Movie Classics calls it "the most significant fictional account of America's post-WWII homecoming".
What's even more amazing about The Best Years Of Our Lives is that it began shooting less than eight months after WWII ended. That director Wyler and producer Samuel Goldwyn were willing to examine the hardships soldiers faced upon coming home so soon after the soldiers actually came home was admirable. That audiences flocked to see the film in both the US and UK was nothing short of remarkable.
"It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features," writes Rosenbaum.
And until it gets deleted, you can watch the whole thing here:
Though subdued by today's standards and puffed out by a melodramatic romantic subplot that's horribly dated, Wyler's Oscar-winner was ahead of its time in its portrayal of the troubles facing veterans coming home from war. It does this by examining the lives of three soldiers returning to smalltown America.
Fred Derry (Andrews), the highest ranking of the three, returns to a family home under a railway bridge and a wife who fell in love with a soldier, not the soda jerk with screaming nightmares and no real job prospects. Then there's Al Stephenson (March), who dives headlong into a drinking problem and his old bank job, where he bristles against his bosses' reluctance regarding the "loans for soldiers" program.
And finally there's Homer Parrish (Russell), who lost his hands in a fire and who struggles with the reactions of his parents and his fiancée. Russell's performance is one of the things people remember most about The Best Years Of Our Lives. He won two Oscars for the role - an honorary one because the Academy wanted to acknowledge his performance didn't think he'd win best supporting actor (which he also won).
If we're being honest, Russell's performance is stilted when stacked up against the professionals, particularly March, Andrews and Loy. But what it represents is huge. He lights cigarettes, plays piano, and shoots a gun, all the while showing a deftness with his prosthetic hooks that brought "aid and comfort to disabled veterans through the medium of motion pictures", as the Academy put it. His performance is far from polished, but he holds his head high, and helped open the door for non-professional actors. His presence also adds a reality to proceedings that amps up the emotion. His homecoming in which his parents see his prosthetics for the first time is a heartbreaking high point of the film.
This is all part of how ahead-of-its-time The Best Years Of Our Lives was. Long before terms like PTSD were coined, it showed the nightmares and substance abuse that would plague many veterans. It pulled apart the disposable nature of service, and the range of public perceptions awaiting them back home. A latter scene where Fred wanders through a field of bombers being scrapped hits hard, and serves as a painful metaphor for the whole story.
Now here's a trailer that mentions none of that stuff:
That trailer sells the film as a romance - if you went and saw the movie on the recommendation of this preview, you'd feel robbed. The romantic subplot is the worst part of the film. The female characters are thinly written - the mother-daughter combo played by Loy and Wright are defined by their men and given little personality of their own, though Loy is so good she hints at unseen depths with the raise of an eyebrow. It's a shame that so much screen time is given over to the will-they-won't-they of Fred and Milly, when the film has more interesting things to say, and clocks in at nearly three hours.
Wyler's direction, aided by Gregg Toland's sharp deep-focus cinematography, is excellent too. There are a couple of great long takes that let the cast shine, and that Wyler gets such a good performance out of Russell is amazing. There's a thoughtfulness that pervades the film, which is typical of Wyler's work.
Wyler would win his second of three best director Oscars for The Best Years Of Our Lives (he was nominated an astounding 12 times). And though he still had the 1959 remake of Ben Hur in front of him, this is greatest work. Very much of its time in some ways, what makes it memorable is how ahead of its time it was in the ways that really mattered. And in that sense, it's never been bettered.
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