World Famous Comics: Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Starring: Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo Directed By: William Wyler Average Rating: Audience Rating: NR (Not Rated) Binding: VHS Tape Format: Black & White, Original recording reissued, Original recording remastered, NTSC Label: Hbo Home Video Number of Items: 1 Release Date: December 09, 1994 Running Time: 170 minutes Theatrical Release Date: 1946
Amazon.com essential video: Winner of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, director, actor, and screenplay, William Wyler's brilliant drama about domestic life after World War II remains one of the all-time classics of American cinema. Inspired by a pictorial article about returning soldiers in Life magazine, the story focuses on three war veterans (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell in unforgettable roles) and their rocky readjustment to civilian life in their Midwestern town of Boone City. Capturing the contradictory moods of America in the mid to late 1940s, this three-hour drama spans a complex range of honest emotions, from joyous celebration and happy reunion to deep-rooted ambivalence and reassessment of personal priorities. A movie milestone when released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives still packs a punch with powerful, timeless themes. --Jeff Shannon
Before the movie, before the screenplay, a book-length poem Many viewers of this great American movie -- it won seven Oscars, including Best Picture, for 1946 -- are unaware that it was based on a most unusual book-length narrative poem by MacKinlay Kantor, "Glory for Me," published in 1945.
In 1970, I was a lieutenant working at the Air Force Historical Research Center. The older historians told a word-of-mouth story how the book and the movie came to be. No doubt the story had been embroidered over many years of retelling, but here's the way I heard it.
In 1944, movie titan Samuel Goldwyn knew that whether the allied victory in World War II would come sooner, or later, millions of American veterans would return home. Many -- especially those with physical and psychological wounds -- would have trouble finding jobs and "readjusting."
Goldwyn knew that journalist and playwright MacKinlay Kantor, who had flown missions with the 305th Bomb Group from England earlier in the war, had gotten to know American servicemen in combat at first hand. Goldwyn asked Kantor to write a screenplay for a planned movie on the veterans returning home.
According to the story, Kantor had driven up to a Tennessee mountain retreat to work on the screenplay. He took his typewriter and a case of bourbon. He emerged some months later with empty bottles and "Glory for Me," written in the form of a narrative poem, not a screenplay. Goldwyn was not pleased, and he eventually gave Kantor's poem to Robert Sherwood to reshape for the screen. When the film finally appeared, Kantor was given a minimum of credit. Sherwood -- deservedly -- won the Oscar for Best Writing.
If you like the movie, you will be richly rewarded by reading the poem.
Kantor's and Sherwood's treatments of the same characters and the same American town ("Boone City") shows two gifted men working the same basic story in different literary forms, poem and screenplay. Reading the book allows one to discover how, here and there, they made some different creative choices.
In Kantor's poem, Homer's disability is spasticity, which makes for some painful reading. Sherwood gave Homer a physical disability -- loss of hands and the use of prosthetic hooks. Sherwood's choice was a wise one for the moviegoing public, and few are the hearts not moved by Harold Phillips' portrayal of Homer in the film. But Kantor's portrayal of Homer and his girl Wilma are equally moving, perhaps because the poem gave more room for character development.
When Frederic March played Al Stephenson -- the older sergeant returning to his prewar life as a banker at the Cornbelt Trust Company -- he masterfully compressed much of Kantor's material in eloquent but short scenes. In Kantor's fuller telling of the story, Al was the son of a pioneer banker who had made loans to farmers a generation earlier. The poem has more social and historical texture.
In Kantor's poem, Homer's uncle Butch (Hoagy Carmichael's character in the movie) provides a vehicle to explore class feelings in pre- and post-war America. This was one of Kantor's themes that Sherwood could not fit into the film. Similarly, Kantor told his readers more about Novak (the veteran asking for a loan to open a nursery) and his experiences as a Seabee in the Pacific. Kantor's use of lilacs as a metaphor for peace and normality could not be picked up in the film.
On the other hand, Sherwood changed the story line to say more about wartime marriages. Marie (Virginia Mayo in the film) proves shallow and unfaithful when Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) returns home. The movie's title, not found in Kantor's poem, came from a scene when the two argued.
The book was published in January, 1945, months before the war ended. Kantor well anticipated the major contours of veteran adjustment, but there was more to his foresight. On the final page of the poem he showed real prescience when he alluded to the unresolved social tensions that all Americans, not just the veterans, would confront in the coming years.
Reading habits have changed in the six decades since the book was published, and readers may now find that it takes some pages to adjust to the poetic form. Kantor's poetic shortcomings earned some dismissive reviews. Poems similar in form by Kantor's contemporaries like Stephen Vincent Benet are now dismissed as middlebrow when they are read at all. I am confident, though, that with each page the reader will find new lines and new scenes to savor and treasure.
"The Best Years of Our Lives" is a truly great American movie. "Glory for Me" deserves equal recognition. Kantor recognized the coming drama of the returning veterans. He dignified their individual struggles in a literary form that recalled the great epics and placed the American veterans among mankind's heroes. He gave an immortal film -- a film that affected tens of millions -- its basic structure, plot, characters, tone, and feeling.
Not a bad result for a few months of solitude with a case of bourbon.
-30-
After the war is over I like this movie. It showed what happens, when the boys come home from war. It's very realistic. I recommend this movie.
Picking Up The Pieces After WWII I'm a confessed sap for old movies. But even among mid twentieth century films, this one is superlative. It was made in 1946, just at the conclusion of world War II.
Three men, unknown to each other in their previous lives, return home to the same town. Al (Fredric March) was a banker, but in the war was an infantryman in the Army. Fred (charming Dana Andrews) prior to the war worked behind the counter serving ice cream and soda but ended up as a Captain (bombadier) in the Air Force. Straight up nice guy Homer (Harold Russell) was a sailor in the Navy and had his hands blown off. This movie is an atypically (for its time) hard look at the difficulties returning veterans had as they tried to get back to the business of living normal lives. Their lives are now intertwined because they share a common experience; a common pain. In many ways I suppose this film was a broad social attempt to begin to heal. Plus, Myrna Loy was in it! :-)
For me, the scene in which Fred deals with his demons in the shell of an old grounded bomber accompanied by a tortured musical score as the camera moves up slowly behind him was one of the great cinematic moments of an already excellent film.
Best Years is the best This movie is one those classics that you can enjoy over and over again. It is timeless in its telling of men coming home from war and the struggles they face. The characters and richly drawn and you find yourself caring for them. The men come home to a place much altered than when they left. Trying to get back into a routine with friends and loved ones, married couples re-adjusting to each other, parents and a girlfired dealing with the double amputations of their son and fiance. To the couple that never should have married and his growing affection for the daughter of another returning vet. Time has been kind to this story and with the current war in our lives it only proves that some things in life trancend time. I really love this story and I think you will too.
Gem of American Film This deeply moving, beautifully written and performed film, was a long-planned tribute by director William Wyler to veterans of World War II, whose heroic service Wyler witnessed first-hand. Posted overseas himself during the war, Wyler vowed that when he returned to Hollywood, he would make a film that paid some sort of tribute to the men he worked with. "The Best Years of Our Lives" is the fulfillment of Wyler's promise. Released in 1947, the film won seven Oscars (it was nominated for eight) including Best Picture and Best Director.
"The Best Years of Our Lives" tells the stories of three veterans returning home to their small midwestern city from active service in WWII: Fred, a much-decorated Air Force pilot (Dana Andrews) from a poor background who, before the war, worked as a soda jerk at a drugstore lunch counter; Homer, a Navy sailor (Harold Russell) and former high school football star who has lost both arms; and Al, an army sergeant who, in civilian life, is a successful banker with two teenaged children.
As the veterans return to homes and wives and/or family (only Homer is not married, although waiting anxiously for him is his high school sweetheart, Wilma, played by Cathy O'Donnell), they confront difficulties reintegrating themselves into ordinary life, and re-establishing emotional contact with those who have been waiting at home. The men carry horrifying war memories that have changed their values and outlook on life, yet also experience disorientation going back to an existence that lacks the immediacy of life lived at the edge of survival.
Al Stevenson finds himself initially shy and reluctant to resume intimate relations with his strong-willed wife (Myrna Loy) - he has to realign the parameters of their relationship with her and their two children who in his absence have blossomed into adulthood. Fred Derry, the Purple Heart pilot, finds that Marie, his lively blonde bombshell of a wife (Virginia Mayo), whom he married without knowing her well just before being sent overseas, has left his parents' home and gotten an apartment and a job of her own; Homer, the disabled sailor, cannot cope with his family's well-meaning but pitying response to his disfigurement, nor can he believe or trust that Wilma still loves him.
The film traces each man's response to the placid pace of civilian life, and to the readjustment he must make to the societal and economic changes of the post-War era that are already spreading across the country. As a disabled veteran, Homer does not have to worry about re-entering the work force, but he feels like a freak and resists Wilma's attempts to reassure him that the loss of his arms has not changed her feelings toward him - he withdraws from his family into a painful depression. Fred is plagued by nightmares about being shot down in his plane, and finds that while his old job behind a five-and-dime lunch counter is now inadequate for a man with his experience, his lack of higher education or other training leaves him few options. Moreover, Fred finds that his pretty wife is unsympathetic to his issues and self-involved, interested only in having a good time. Al finds that although he is welcomed back into his fine job at the bank, his desire to approve loans to returning veterans who haven't much collateral to back them up are challenged by his higher-ups, to whom he must explain why he trusts these men to honor their debt, and to whom the country owes a debt.
As Homer tries to drive Wilma away, because he does not want her to marry him out of pity, Fred's and Al's lives overlap. Fred finds himself unable to function at his old job or take orders from a fresh-faced college grad who did not serve in the war, and loses the job when he slugs a man at the lunch counter who insinuates that the war was an unnecessary one foisted on America by Roosevelt. Marie is unwilling to adjust her lifestyle downward to accommodate only his service benefits and resents not being able to go out and enjoy life, and eventually she leaves him for another ex-serviceman who is doing better. At the same time, through his friendship with Al, Fred has met Peggy, Al's daughter (Teresa Wright), who is charming, intelligent, and virtuous, and falls in love with her. Touched by Fred's struggles, and by the innate qualities that she discerns in him, Peggy is equally attracted to this diamond in the rough. But Al, much as he admires and likes Fred, cannot approve of his cherished daughter's relationship with the drifting, still-married Fred, and tells Fred to stay away from Peggy.
Finally, in one of the most tender scenes ever filmed, Wilma one evening helps Homer remove his prosthetic arms and get ready for bed in his parent's home. Homer realizes that Wilma truly loves him and tells her that he has always loved her and will never love anyone else. In another wonderful scene, the disrupted relationship between Al and his wife moves into calmer waters as they relate to the confused Peggy the emotional hardhips of the early years of their marriage, and how they moved forward, anyway, committed to their lives together as a family. And, in what is perhaps the film's most famous scene, Fred exorcises some of his wartime demons in the cockpit of a B-52 that is about to be dismantled, needed for materials to fulfill the demand for inexpensive housing in post-War America. Fred persuades the boss of the outfit performing the work to give him a job.
At the end of the film, the three veterans gather for Homer's wedding in Wilma's parent's house. Marie is divorcing Fred, who is living with his father and stepmother. During the touchingly home-made parlor wedding (compare it to the luxurious church wedding of the spoilt Kay Banks in "Father of the Bride" just three years later), Fred and Peggy, at opposite ends of the parlor, gaze at each other during the simple service and silently commit themselves to each other. While the other guests are congratulating the newly married Homer and Wilma, Fred takes Peggy in his arms and as he does so, her hat falls off as she embraces him, a charming symbolic reference to surrender and the move from girlhood to womanhood.
"The Best Years of Our Lives" is a long film, nearly three hours, but is worth every moment of your time as Wyler, whose love for his protagonists shows in every frame, portrays their shifting relationships and the adjustment both they and America make as they move into the new environment of post-World War II America.
The performances are sensitive and heart-felt, with special mention going to Dana Andrews as Fred Derry, the tormented air force hero from the wrong side of the tracks who finds himself adrift in a new world. Harold Russell, who plays Homer, was, in fact, a disabled veteran who had never acted when he was selected for this role. While clearly the work of an amateur, his (wisely) unadorned performance works well and garnered a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. Frederic March has never been one of my favorite actors, but his undeniable gifts bring Al Stevenson to life, and won for March the Best Actor Oscar. Cathy O'Donnell (who would later appear as Charlton Heston's young sister in "Ben-Hur") gives an affecting, low-key performance as the patient, loving Wilma. Myrna Loy and Teresa Wright are perfect as, respectively, the classy, forthright Mrs. Stevenson, and as Peggy Stevenson, who shows her mother's backbone in her determination to stand by and help the man she has chosen.
Virginia Mayo, a highly under-rated actress, is marvellous as the high-spirited, "selfish" Marie. Mayo has a thankless role here as the one woman in the film who is unwilling to sacrifice her own interests to support her man, but she makes the most of it and gives the role bite and life. The role of Marie brings me to the one quibble I have with this otherwise flawlessly conceived and delivered film, of which I am deeply fond, and which never fails to reduce me to tears.
Wyler draws what is, in my opinion, far too sharp a distinction between the "good" and "bad" women in this film. It is notable that Marie, the one woman in the film who is overtly uninterested in making sacrifices for the returning soldier, is also the only woman in the film who is overtly sexual. Marie's curvaceous figure, blondeness, provocative clothes, and love of a good time stand in contrast to the rather extreme asexuality of Peggy and Wilma, the two young virgins, who are both very thin, dress plainly, and are constantly seen happily performing routine household tasks such as cooking breakfast and washing dishes. They appear to have no individual cores whatsoever that do not revolve around Homer and Fred. The climate of the post-War era must be taken into account here, as a time when women were being heavily pressured to give up the jobs they had held during the war in the men's absence (and consequently, give up their taste of economic independence) so that returning veterans could have the jobs; women were also being heavily pressured to take up lives centered wholly on homemaking - the result, of course, was the post-War "baby boom".
Fred Derry is a sympathetic character with legitimate issues, but it is not as if Marie is entirely wrong to be disappointed at how things seem to be turning out when he returns. Fred IS a difficult package, and he and Marie married without knowing each other at all. Marie loves her independent life and that she should be demonized (that is the only word for it) for preferring to move on and enjoy life, rather than staying home with a brooding, troubled husband who refuses to let her augment their slender income with a job, begs some questions of the ideals women were expected to fulfill in the post-War era - ideals which led to the first wave of feminism as the 1950s closed and the 1960s opened. As Marie storms out of their small apartment, she shouts, "I'm going to live for myself!". No sentiment could have been less appreciated in American women after the war, and Marie's declaration is meant to demonstrate the height of unwomanly behavior, particularly compared to the purity, selflessness, and curious asexuality of Peggy and Wilma, as they commit themselves to men with notable problems. Only Myrna Loy, among the "good" women, is allowed to show a bit of pepper and curve, but then, she has been proven as the faithful matron and mother. In this reviewer's opinion, the contrast Wyler draws between the openly sexual and independent Marie and the two selfless, asexual younger girls, is unfair and, as history proved over subsequent decades of social upheaval, unrealistic.
That issue aside, my respect and affection for this exceptional film has remained undimmed over the years.
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