The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Three American servicemen are returning home from World War Two. They hitch a ride in the same B-17 bomber that will take them all back to their Middle American home town of Boone City. The three men are Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), Al Stephenson (Fredric March) and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell). 

The men represent the three different services (Air Force, Army and Navy), with Fred an Air Force officer and bombardier, Al an army sergeant and Homer a sailor. The three men all have the same general problems with returning to civilian life, as well as their own specific problems relating to their individual circumstances.

Al (March) was a senior figure in a bank before the war. He returns to his old job with relative ease, but has to reconnect with his wife (Myrna Loy) and family. His children are now bordering on young adulthood and he has missed seeing them grow up. His son doesn't show much interest in his war mementoes and, worst of all, the maid has left them, meaning his daughter has to do the dishes. 

Al settles back into his job at the bank, where he has to approve loans to ex-servicemen. One loan, to a man who wants to buy a farm, brings him into conflict with his superiors. Al feels that they should do more for the men returning from the war and help them to create new lives and businesses. In the army, he was used to working on his instincts, making quick decisions and judging a man by his character. In the bank, however, it's simply a tick box culture. Out of sorts with his family and his job, Al becomes just a little bit too reliant on alcohol to help him cope.

Homer (Harold Russell), Fred (Dana Andrews) and Al (Fredric March)

Fred (Andrews) was a soda jerk in a drug store before the war and he doesn't know what he's going to do now he's been demobbed, but he knows one thing for sure; he's never going back to that drug store again. The Air Force has turned him into an officer and a gentlemen, well an officer anyway, and he expects more. But he struggles to find work, learning that there's not much demand for bomb aimers in peacetime. Eventually he has to go back to working in the drug store, where he finds his old assistant is now his supervisor. 

Fred is plagued by a recurring nightmare about his experiences in the war and is suffering from what we would now recognise as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. He also finds that his marriage is in trouble. He married his party girl wife Marie (Virginia Mayo) during his aircrew training and they have spent only a couple of weeks of married life together. 

Marie is decidedly unenthusiastic about living on his meagre wages at the drug store, especially after she's been used to living on an officer's salary, and only finds Fred attractive when he's wearing the Air Force uniform that he's struggling to cast off. His attempts to save money by eating at home and cutting down on going out also go down badly, and Marie begins to look elsewhere for company.

The last of the three men is former sailor Homer (Russell), who has lost his hands in an explosion on board ship and now uses hooks instead. He is especially apprehensive about what his family and friends will make of his hooks and struggles to be treated normally. Most of all, he's concerned about the reaction of his girl, Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell), and wonders if she will still want to marry him.

The Best Years of Our Lives was inspired by an article in Time magazine about US Marines returning home from WWII. The screenplay had a slightly tortuous development, with the independent producer Samuel Goldwyn commissioning author and journalist MacKinlay Kantor to write a treatment. 

Homer (Harold Russell) is reunited with his family

Mark Harris explains the evolution of the script in his book Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War. When Kantor delivered his treatment it was in the form of a 268 page blank verse novel, eventually to be published as Glory for Me. 

Quite apart from what Kantor himself admitted was its "unusual form", his treatment was very dark and pessimistic, with the main characters all irretrievably traumatised by their wartime experiences. Goldwyn asked a very reluctant Robert E. Sherwood to try and turn Kantor's outline into a more optimistic screenplay. 

The film would reunite Goldwyn with his contract director William Wyler. Wyler had made several prestige pictures for Goldwyn, including Dead End (1937), Wuthering Heights (1939) and The Little Foxes (1941), before joining the US Army Air Corps to make documentaries in Europe. The film re-teamed Wyler with his regular cinematographer of the 1940s, Greg Toland, and editor Daniel Mandell.

Like Sherwood, Wyler was determined that the film should have a more hopeful message than MacKinlay Kantor's version. But he was also eager to make sure that it was authentic. Having been stationed in England, he had become embarrassed by the sentimental and unrealistic vision of wartime Britain in his earlier feature Mrs Miniver (1942). 

Wyler wanted to avoid traditional Hollywood gloss and instead give his film a greater sense of reality. He even had Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright forego the services of a costume designer and instead allocated them a modest amount to go and buy their characters' clothes in a department store. 

William Wyler was uncertain about taking on the film at all. His latest film, Thunderbolt, a documentary following a squadron of US P-47 Thunderbolt fighters in action, was struggling even to get released. The film wasn't finished until after the war had already ended, meaning that the Army had lost interest in it, and it wouldn't receive a token cinema release until 1947. 

Worse, a flight in a B-25 bomber over Italy, during the making of Thunderbolt, had badly damaged Wyler's hearing, to the point that he was almost completely deaf. In order to be able to hear the actors properly while making The Best Years of Our Lives, the director had to sit beneath the camera on the set and wear headphones rigged up to an amplifier.

Hoagy Carmichael, Harold Russell & Fredric March gather around the piano,
while in the background Dana Andrews makes an important call 

Despite that, The Best Years of Our Lives finds Wyler on top form, drawing strong performances from his cast and shooting in a restrained style that rarely draws attention to itself. Robert E. Sherwood's intelligent script weaves the stories of the three men and their families together in a way that doesn't feel contrived, and the film is aided by Greg Toland's subtle and effective use of deep focus photography, enabling us to see the different elements of a scene unfold. 

At 172 minutes, the film is very long for a 1940s production, but it manages to justify its length with involving and occasionally moving characters and relationships. The film perfectly captures the mood of the immediate post-war period, the hopes, dreams, fears and insecurities of the men returning from the war, as well as of their families and loved ones. 

Will their marriages and relationships still be the same? Will their children still know them? Will they be able to find new jobs? Will they be able to pick up their lives where they left them, and will they even want to, after all that they've seen and been through? The film also hints at the fear and resentment among civilians of thousands of men returning to compete in the job market, and the lingering hostility of some people at home about America's involvement in the war.

Arguably, the actors are a little too old for their roles; Andrews was 37 and March 50, while Myrna Loy was only 13 years older than her screen daughter Teresa Wright. But it's not a major problem and the performances are generally very good. Dana Andrews became a rather wooden actor as he got older, but here he gives easily one of his best and most sympathetic performances as Fred Derry, a man who doesn't fit in his marriage or his career any more. 

Also notable is Harold Russell as Homer. Russell was a soldier who had lost his hands in an explosion on D-Day, 6th June 1944. But this happened not in Normandy, but at an army training ground in North Carolina. He had been seen by Wyler in the short training film Diary of a Sergeant (1945), which was intended to highlight the care received by wounded veterans. 

This must have been a difficult part to play for Russell, with the experiences so close to home, but his remarkable naturalism makes him very memorable and sympathetic in this role. Wyler admitted the difficulties he had in directing Russell who, after all, was not actually an actor. Wyler explained that he "concentrated on guiding his thinking more than his actions, because I reasoned that if he was thinking along the right lines, he just couldn't do anything wrong."

Peggy (Teresa Wright) comforts Fred (Dana Andrews) after a wartime flashback

 

While the film is honest about the problems facing returning servicemen, it's also tinged with hope and optimism for the future. In one memorable scene, Andrews wanders around an enormous scrap yard of warplanes, decommissioned now that they are no longer needed. He meets a scrap dealer there who tells him the planes are going to be turned into scrap metal and then used to make prefabricated homes. It's not exactly swords into plough shares, but the message is clear enough, as is the symbolism of Andrews's demobbed aircrewman wandering through a field of expensive warplanes, now ready to be turned into scrap. 

If I'm going to nit-pick (and I will, but only briefly), the scene where Andrews explores a B-17 cockpit is let down by the fact that it wobbles furiously as he moves around it, giving away that this isn't a real fuselage but a set open at one end. William Wyler had spent a lot of time in American bombers and made the documentary film The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress (1944) while in the US Army Air Corps, which may partly explain the prominence of B-17s in The Best Years of Our Lives.

The Best Years of Our Lives is deliberately but unselfconsciously a serious, significant film about the challenges facing servicemen returning to America following WWII. But instead of overtly presenting itself as a “problem picture” it focuses on working as a character drama about human relationships. 

The attitudes of the film are suggested by its ambiguous title. It's Marie who tells Fred that she “gave up the best years of my life” waiting for him to return from the war. But the film itself is unclear exactly what it means by the phrase. It could refer to the years the men spent in the war and the years their families spent without them. It could mean that, for some, their wartime experiences were actually a peak, of excitement, purpose and camaraderie. Or it could equally mean that the characters' best years can begin now, with their return from the war. Given this ambiguity, it's appropriate that each man's story is left open-ended, with the possibility of happiness, but not its guarantee.

One of the reasons The Best Years of Our Lives still works for a contemporary audience is because, while it's firmly and irrevocably a film of the immediate post-war years, the problems the men face still have a universal quality at heart. On the one hand, the challenges they have to overcome are definitely of that generation and era, the effects of war injuries, of PTSD, of men returning from war in their thousands to a difficult job market and uncertain future. But The Best Years of Our Lives still feels relevant, because people still have failing marriages, they still feel stuck in jobs they dislike, they can still feel alienated from their families and they can still be uncertain about their futures.  

Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) in the plane scrap yard

The film ran into some trouble with the Breen office, who still presided over the Production Code in Hollywood. Joseph Breen took particular dislike to the scene where Fred Derry attacks a customer arguing that American involvement in the war was a mistake. In the script, Sherwood had the man argue that Americans were tricked into the war by "radicals and Jew-lovers in Washington". The part about Jews had to come out, although Wyler got his revenge by attacking Breen's office in a New York Times interview, saying that it had convinced him that "those people have no real judgment".

While many in the industry thought that audiences would prefer escapism, the makers sensed that the film would strike a chord with the public. They weren't wrong. The Best Years of Our Lives became an enormous hit, second only at the time to Gone with the Wind (1939). Samuel Goldwyn's films were now being released through RKO and The Best Years of Our Lives steamrollered RKO's own now forgotten returning vets production Till the End of Time.

The film caught the mood of the times perhaps like no other film, not only in the US but in other countries too. Unsurprisingly, the film was also a huge hit in Britain, where thousands of returning servicemen were facing similar problems. This is the film of which Goldwyn supposedly said "I don't care if it doesn’t make a nickel, as long as every man, woman and child in America sees it."

The critics were rhapsodic and the praise unanimous. The film swept the board at the Academy Awards, winning seven Oscars, beating Frank Capra's It's a Wonderful Life and Laurence Olivier's Henry V for Best Picture. It also won Best Director, Best Actor for Fredric March, Best Supporting Actor (for Harold Russell), Best Screenplay, Best Music Score and Best Editing, and Samuel Goldwyn also received the Irving G. Thalberg Memorial Award for his body of work as a producer. 

As well as winning Best Supporting Actor, Harold Russell received a special Oscar "for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in The Best Years of Our Lives", thereby making him the only actor to receive two Academy Awards for the same performance.

The film was William Wyler's last film for Goldwyn and is probably the best film produced during their partnership. Wyler would enjoy great success in the 1950s with Roman Holiday (1953), The Big Country (1958) and another Academy Award Best Picture winner, Ben Hur (1959), but I'm not sure he ever quite hit the heights he did with The Best Years of Our Lives. The film remains one of the best depictions of the problems of men returning from war, and one of the best American films of the 1940s.

The Best Years of Our Lives

Year: 1946
Genre: Drama
Country: USA
Director: William Wyler

Cast  Fredric March (Al Stephenson), Dana Andrews (Fred Derry), Myrna Loy (Milly Stephenson), Harold Russell (Homer Parrish), Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson), Virginia Mayo (Marie Derry), Cathy O'Donnell (Wilma Cameron), Hoagy Carmichael (Butch Engle), Gladys George (Hortense Derry), Steve Cochran (Cliff Scully), Ray Collins (Mr Milton), Roman Bohnen (Pat Derry), Minna Gombell (Mrs Parrish), Walter Baldwin (Mr Parrish), Dorothy Adams (Mrs Cameron), Don Beddoe (Mr Cameron), Victor Cutler (Woody), Marlene Aames (Luella Parrish), Ray Teal (Mr Mollett), Charles Halton (Prew), Howland Chamberlin (Thorpe), Dean White (Novak), Erskine Sanford (Bullard), Michael Hall (Rob Stephenson)

Screenplay Robert E. Sherwood, based on the verse novel Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor  Producer Samuel Goldwyn  Cinematography Gregg Toland  Art Directors George Jenkins, Perry Ferguson  Editor Daniel Mandell  Music Hugo Friedhofer  Music director Emil Newman

Running time 172 mins  (black & white) 

Production company Samuel Goldwyn Productions  Distributor RKO Radio Pictures