The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Directed by William Wyler

Myrna Loy (Milly Stephenson),
Fredric March (Al Stephenson)
Dana Andrews (Fred Derry)
Teresa Wright (Peggy Stephenson)
Virginia Myo (Marie Derry)
Cathy O'Donnell (Wilma Cameron)
Hoagy Carmichael (Butch Engle)
Harold Russell (Homer Parrish)
Ray Collins (Mr. Milton)
Steve Cochran (Cliff Scully)

The idea for the story originated with Mrs Samuel Goldwyn who brought her husband's attention to the plight of returning servicemen. Goldwyn asked novelist McKinley Kantor to write the story. Kantor wrote a novelGlory for Me which Robert Sherwood adapted as The Best Years of Our Lives.

Before watching it again recently, I could recall a few scenes - Homer by the piano talking about his hooks, Wilma helping Homer get ready for bed, Fred quarreling with his wife over good-looking Steve Cochran, and Fred climbing into an old bomber in the airplane graveyard.

The movie received a lot of recognition in 1946, winning Oscars for Best Actor, Best Director, Best Film Editing, Best Music, Best Picture, Best Writing, and Best Sound. Harold Russell won for Best Actor in a Supporting Role. Although a non-professional, cast because of his disability, Russell surprised everyone by turning in a respectable performance that deserved the award.

The film addresses post-war problems of adjustment faced by men returning from several years of war-time military service.

Problems of the Disabled Veteran: Homer represents the men who are made to feel less than masculine because of their disabilities. (Wounded female veterans were not in anyone's thinking in 1946.) Homer must come to grips with the fact that he has hooks instead of hands. Wyler stages several scenes that place Homer in proximity to the hands of others, for example, those of Butch as he plays the piano.

Part of Homer's conflict is external, caused by the reactions of others, but even when people aren't staring at his hooks, he feels that they are. He refuses to believe his childhood sweetheart Wilma when she assures him that she loves him and still wants to marry him. He has to wrestle with the feeling that his disability has made him less of a man and therefore less deserving of a woman's love. He has to come to terms with the fact that in some areas of his life he must now depend upon the help of others for simple acts that uninjured people can do for themselves.

Problems of unemployment and loss of status: Fred Derry was a well-paid Captain in the air force, but, because of inadequate civilian employment experience before the war, he can't find anything but the lowliest employment. His disability is a psychological one. From being part of a military elite as an officer, he has fallen into a social underclass. In the post-war U.S., returning soldiers were seen as a threat to people already employed. A lot of women were, in fact, pushed out of the work force by men so it is interesting that in the film, one of the women employees at the super drug store is sympathetic to the idea of Fred's coming back to work while a male employee is hostile.

Problems of hypocrisy in high places: Al Stephenson (Frederick March) is a foil to the Dana Andrews character. Fred Derry was a captain in the military and must step down socially and financially. For Al, the return to civilian life means a rise in status. From being only a sergeant in the army, he goes to work as a highly-paid banker. His employer, played by Ray Collins, pays lip service to the need to help returning veterans re-establish themselves in civilian life, but applies such restrictive requirements on borrowing that few applicants are able to qualify for GI loans. Al gets into trouble for bypassing strict lending rules in order to grant small loans to deserving veterans.

The Derry character also encounters hypocrisy in the workplace. The manager of the drug store acknowledges the fact that returning soldiers did a great job as soldiers, but he goes on to say that mere battlefield experience does not qualify them for anything beyond entry-level jobs in the civilian work force.

Problems of marital stress: Unlike Fred, Al has come home to a stable marriage with a beautiful, wise, and patient wife played by Myrna Loy, but fears renewed intimacy. On his first night back he seeks a false gaiety--and avoids being alone with his wife--by taking his wife and daughter on a pub crawl, drinking himself into a stupor. In the days that follow he drinks excessively. Alcohol has become a crutch to him, a means to dull the pain of the disconnect between his life of the past four years and the changed realities of civilian and family life.

In contrast to Al, whose marriage is in its twentieth year, Fred returns to an unstable union begun barely twenty days before he shipped out. His wife, played by Virginia Mayo, is a superficial party girl who married him for no better reason than that he looked good in a uniform, and because he had enough money to show her a good time. She has lived well on his allotment of $200 a month plus her own earnings as a nightclub entertainer. When he trades his uniform for civvies and has trouble finding work, she dumps him for an old boyfriend, played by Steve Cochran.

As the three men, Fred, Al, and Homer, struggle with the transition from the horrors of war to the domestic and economic arrangements of civilian life, what bothers them most is the constant refrain on the lips of those who have not shared their experiences:

The war's over. Why can't you just forget about the war and get back to the way things used to be?

The answer, now as then, is that for men and women who have served in a war zone, things can never be as they used to be.

The Best Years of Our Lives is sixty years old, but, unfortunately, it is a long way from being out-of-date.