The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Directed by William Wyler
Peace, peace — we long for it. And men who have left home and loved ones behind, certainly they long for peace. But that can’t just be that they no longer need to carry arms in a foreign country. They long to return to a life in order; perhaps, though, a life they have not ever really known. That is the problem besetting the soldiers whose stories after the second World War are told in William Wyler’s profoundly moving film, The Best Years of Our Lives, which we are revisiting this week.
How do you thank the men who have come back from war? And how do the men themselves fit back in to an ordinary life, after what they have seen and done? Even after that great war, when everybody in America believed in the justice of the Allied cause, and the men were hailed as heroes, those were not easy questions to answer, and it’s to Wyler’s immense credit and that of screen writer MacKinlay Kantor, that The Best Years of Our Lives gives us nothing easy, nothing to flatter everybody all the way around. For the men who came home weren’t standard-issue soldiers. There are no such. They were unique human persons, with all the passions, the love, the doubt, the sadness, and the joy that go along with that; and they were leaving a life of military order in the midst of chaos, to enter a life of a very different kind of order, and a different kind of confusion, too.
The film tells the story of three soldiers returning to the same good old midwestern town. Al Stephenson (Fredric March) was a banker before the war, the wealthiest of the three, but he turns to drink to allay his troubles, and his relations with his wife Milly (played by Myrna Loy with her usual quiet intensity) are marked not by a steady and confident love, but by the need to fall in love again and again, after the war as before. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) is a blue-collar worker whose house, literally, is on the wrong side of the railroad tracks, and his wife (Virginia Mayo) is impatient with him because he doesn’t make enough money, as he can only land a job sweeping a broom at the druggist’s. Such are the thanks he gets both from his wife and from the Americans he fought for. But the most remarkable of the three soldiers is Homer Parrish, a cherubic young man whose hands were burnt off in a fire. For Parrish, Wyler didn’t choose a professional actor at all, but a man named Harold Russell, who lost his hands in an accident with TNT while he was training paratroopers in North Carolina. Russell had to learn to use metal hooks for his hands, and we see those hooks, and how they work, what they can do and what they can’t do — they can’t touch, they can’t feel. And Homer is worried that his fiancee Wilma (fresh-faced Cathy O’Donnell, whom you will remember as Judah’s sister in Ben-Hur) is going to marry him out of misplaced gratitude and pity, rather than for love.
The stories of the three men are woven together with great skill — and each must come to some kind of resolution. I won’t give out any spoilers here, except to say that Al’s daughter Peggy — was there ever any actress who could portray innocence, passion, and earnestness better than Teresa Wright? — sees what Fred’s wife is doing to him, and that Al’s boss at the bank (Ray Collins) is going to have to learn that guts and integrity are collateral just as sound as money and property are, and that even when happiness does not seem to be within our reach, the decision to love, to be grateful, always is. Watch then this most honest of films, and give thanks to God and to your loved ones for all the good things you have known. Watch, and learn of what peace we can know on earth; a foretaste of the peace that is perfect order, and pure love.
When I was a teenager I started watching this film but stopped because I was afraid it would cut too close to home. In WWII my father was an 22-year-old infantry platoon leader who landed on Utah Beach. He led repeated attacks on the German line and then was critically wounded by a mine which left him permanently disabled , in pain, and badly scarred. He also had PTSD for 40 years, manifesting in terrifying nightmares about being back on the battlefield. His screams were awful. He told me that “Saving Private Ryan” (which I have not seen) was the closest depiction of his experience. He was, though, successful in his post-war life both at home and at work. He was a man of deep faith and the kindest of fathers to his many children. As a teenager I did not want to know what suffering he must have gone through. My mother tells me that I should watch “The Best Years of Our Lives”… so I’ll think about it.
Thank you for the recommendation. My grandfather was a WW2 prisoner of war and spent 6 months in a Nazi prison camp. After returning home, he became a violent alcoholic, and after many painful and disordered years attempting a family life, abandoned his wife and 5 children. My mother never forgave him. The painful scar of this memory remains in my family to this day. War is an ugly business. I will watch this movie with my wife and son.