The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

3.5 stars out of 4

The Bottom Line:

An affecting and touching story or three soldiers returning from WWII to a country that has changed profoundly since they've been gone, The Best Years of our lives has lost little of its power over the years; though at times the movie feels overly melodramatic, it's a very worthy and well-acted tale. December 27, 2008

What a great movie!

I had only seen snippets of this movie on TV through the years, so I was surprised and pleased at how good a film it is -- still relevant in many ways more than half a century after it was made. It gives a realistic picture of what it was like for returning veterans from WWII, who came back to a largely mundane existence after the terror and excitement of war. It shows how hard this adjustment was for the vets, and how their families also had to struggle with the changes. I highly recommend it. December 24, 2008

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- July 4, 2008

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. May 20, 2008

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. May 18, 2008

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