The Best Years of Our Lives
William Wyler (1946)
Perhaps the most remarkable thing about The Best Years of Our Lives, although the competition is keen, is that this story of three World War II servicemen returning to civilian life was completed and released as early as November 1946. Samuel Goldwyn read a Time piece in August 1944 about the difficulties experienced by ex-servicemen and commissioned a treatment from a former war correspondent, Mackinlay Kantor, who produced a novella called Glory For Me (in blank verse), which Robert E Sherwood turned into the screenplay for William Wyler’s picture. The Best Years of Our Lives was a huge commercial success and won seven Oscars. If you Google posters for the movie you’ll find one that declares it to be ‘The Most Honored Picture of Our Time! … The Best Loved Picture of All Time!’ David Thomson ‘would concede that Best Years is decent and humane… acutely observed, despite being so meticulous a package’. Pauline Kael finds ‘something absorbing about the banality of its large-scale good intentions; it’s compulsively watchable’. In the 2012 top-10-of-all-time lists in Sight & Sound, the film was included by six critics and three directors, among them Francis Ford Coppola.
The Best Years of Our Lives begins with the return of the three servicemen to their homes in a place called Boone City, supposedly modelled on Cincinnati. For me, these homecomings were emotionally very powerful – partly because they made me think of what it might have been like for my father to come back to my mother and to York after four years as a POW, partly because William Wyler stages them very skilfully. The local life glimpsed and the street sounds heard by the soldiers from inside the car they’re travelling in are made both familiar and newly-minted. This commingling of things remembered and strange to the men is sustained once they’re back inside their homes and seeing their wives and families. It’s hard to overstate how strongly many people in 1946 must have identified with the story as a whole and with these sequences in particular – especially as the film arrived in cinemas when the audience’s own memories of the previous year were still so fresh in their minds. For people struggling to readapt to civilian life it obviously wasn’t necessary even to rely on memory.
The film is schematic in various respects: the trio represent each of the three armed forces and each man must cope with a particular type of legacy from the war. The navy man, Homer Parrish, has been physically disabled. The decorated airforce pilot, Fred Derry, has to go back to working in a drugstore. The platoon sergeant, Al Stephenson, returns to a job in a bank which includes approving or not approving loans to other war veterans. But these situations are detailed, and the characters written and played, in ways that transcend the schematism. The three men didn’t know each other before the War. They meet on a plane flying home, and they don’t expect to see each other again once they’re back in Boone City. The happily married Al Stephenson celebrates in a local bar with his wife and daughter on the night of his return. When he bumps into Fred Derry there, Fredric March expresses Al’s delighted surprise so well that he makes the instant reunion more than plausible.
Al gets back home from Butch’s Bar considerably the worse for wear and March’s playing of this drunk scene and the next morning’s hangover is a masterpiece. At the same time, he’s completely convincing as someone who works in a bank. It’s a great performance. Dana Andrews’s portrait of Fred is admirably disciplined: he avoids sentimentality, in spite of the opportunities to indulge in it, and suggests very well, but not obviously, the erosion of Fred Derry’s self-belief back in Boone City. Harold Russell, who plays Homer, was not a professional actor but really did lose his hands in World War II (while he was making a training film with the US 13th Airborne Division a defective fuse detonated an explosive that Russell was handling). If you’re aware of these things, it’s hard not to view Russell’s contribution to the film in a different light. He can act, however, so casting him in the role of Homer doesn’t come across as awkwardly exploitative.
Myrna Loy shows plenty of wit as Al’s wife Milly – she and March are a very credible married couple – but the younger women are less well served by the script. The role of Homer’s loyal girlfriend Wilma, played by Cathy O’Donnell, is thin and although Virginia Mayo is animated as Fred’s trampy wife Marie, the character is conceived in a censorious, puritanical way. As Al and Milly’s daughter Peggy, Teresa Wright is less pious than usual and good in her early scenes with Dana Andrews: as the relationship between Peggy and Fred intensifies and – because he’s a married man – creates tensions with her parents, Wright becomes more conventional. Peggy’s teenage brother Rob (Michael Hall) is a feeble role – the character is more or less dropped after the opening scenes.
William Wyler’s storytelling is clear and he gives The Best Years of Our Lives, which runs nearly three hours, an effortless momentum. Wyler also allows some scenes between two characters, especially Al and Milly, to continue for what seems a daringly long time, and these are thoroughly rewarding. The film does make some obvious liberal points but not everything is resolved in the way you expect. When he bridles in public against the hard-nosed attitude of his boss (Ray Collins) towards loans for ex-servicemen, you expect Al to lose his job but life isn’t so simple. He stays at the bank and you get a sense of the abrasive effect that his continuing misgivings will have on Al’s working life.
28 December 2012