The Best Years of Our Lives (Samuel Goldwyn Productions, RKO, 1946)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My husband Charles and I got home relatively early from the St. Paul's
Episcopal Cathedrai concert, with great bus luck, and when we got in it was shortly after 7 p.m. I looked at the online schedule of Turner Classic Movies and noted that starting at 7:15 p.m. they were showing two movies in a row that had legendary reputations even though I’d never seen either one before. The first one was the 1946 Samuel Goldwyn epic about returning servicemembers, The Best Years of Our Lives, directed by William Wyler from a script by Robert E. Sherwood based on a novel called Glory for Me by MacKinlay Kantor that was written in blank verse. The film is set in the fictitious Midwestern town of “Boone City” (I’m guessing it’s supposed to be Iindianapolis or some other mid-sized Midwestern city) and deals with the struggles of three returning servicemembers to readjust to civilian life and try to pick up where they left off to go to war even though the world in general and their community in particular have moved on without them. Both William Wyler and Robert E. Sherwood had actually served in World War II, and Wyler, like the haunting Harold Russell in the movie – a real-life amputee whom Wyler noticed in a training film about how to use his prosthetic hands – had returned with a service-related disability. Wyler had directed a documentary called The Memphis Belle that had required him to fly many hours in the cockpit of a B-17 bomber, and the noise of the plane led to a partial hearing loss which was so severe that for the remaining quarter-century of his directorial career Wyler had to use a set of headphones, plugged into the sound engineer’s board, to hear the actors speak their lines so he could continue to direct. In the original novel Russell’s character, Homer Parrish, was a spastic, but Wyler felt that this would look funny on screen, so he wanted the character to have an obvious physical disability instead.

The two other servicemembers who come back to Boone City with Homer are Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a former soda jerk who boasts that his ability to aim a scoop of ice cream into a fountain glass prepared him for his wartime service as a bombardier; and Al Stephenson (Fredric March), an executive with the Cornbelt Bank who in the army had to take orders from Derry because he outranked him. When the taxi that picks up the three men at the airport arrives at their homes, Al offers to pay the cabbie but Fred says no, he’ll take care of the bill. One of the aspects of The Best Years of Our Lives that surprised me is how class-conscious it is: while both Al and Fred are able to get jobs with their former employers, Al waltzes into the Cornbelt Bank and is given a promotion to head their small-loans department while Fred has to work under a man whom he not only couldn’t stand before the war but who hated the nickname Fred called him. The Best Years of Our Lives swept the Academy Awards the year it was eligible, and Harold Russell became (and remains) the only actor in history to win two Oscars for the same performance in the same film. The Academy board voted him a special award for having contributed to the positive screen portrayal of people with disabilities, and he won the regular competitive award for Best Supporting Actor as well. As someone who worked so long with people with disabilities as an in-home caregiver, I’m all to familiar with the yin and yang of Russell’s character, at once proud of all the things he can still do for himself and deeply embarrassed and ashamed whenever his abilities fall short.

But quite frankly the most compelling character in the story is Fred Derry, and Dana Andrews turns in a tour de force performance in the role. Fred has periodic flashbacks to the war in whcih his plane caught fire and he has to talk a fellow crewman into parachuting out of the plane: a surprisingly accurate depiction of what’s now called post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) well before that term for it was coined. Fred also got married impulsively just before he shipped out to Marie (Virginia Mayo), a woman who by the time he comes home has staked out her own level of freedom and independence. She works as a cocktail waitress at a local bar – Charles was surprised at how many bars and nightclubs there are in this movie, including one in which Gene Krupa performs (likely a leftover shot from a previous Sam Goldwyn production, Ball of Fire, in which Krupa was featured), especially given that the setting is a presumably morally conservative Midwestern city! – and she moved out of Fred’s parents’ home and took a room in an apartment building which Fred is denied entrance to. Fred starts to fall in love with Al Stephenson’s daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright in her first real acting opportunity since her marvelous performance in Alfred Hitchcock’s Shadow of a Doubt three years earlier), and he’s suffering the predictable guilt feelings over being in love with someone other than his wife. Eventually Marie chews him out for not being able to get a job besides his old one as a soda jerk (for a drugstore that’s now been bought out by a large national chain) and announces that she wants a divorce. It’s possible to read Marie as the typical good-time slut like Doris Dowling’s role as Alan Ladd’s scapegrace wife in The Blue Dahlia, but it’s also possible to give her a more feminist reading as a woman fiercely committed to her own independence, no longer willing to be tied down to a domineering husband, and finally determined to live on her own. Virginia Mayo herself joked around Hollywood that she had been responsible for Wyler winning the Best Director Academy Award for The Best Years of Our Lives because people watching it thought, “Wow, if he could get that good a performance out of Virginia Mayo … !”

Homer’s story arc is that he’s determined to marry his childhood sweetheart, Wilma Cameron (Cathy O’Donnell, a promising young actress whose career went nowhere because she married William Wyler’s brother Robert, and for some reason that incensed Sam Goldwyn and led him to do everything in his considerable power to destroy her career); she’s still in love with him but he’s convinced that she won’t be able to stand living with him long-term because of his disability. In one of the film’s most famous scenes, Homer shows Wilma how helpless he is when he takes off the harness to which his prostheses are connected and essentially gives her a lecture that if she marries him, she’ll have to bear the responsibility of putting them on him every morning. Meanwhile Al Stephenson’s character arc is considerably less interesting, even though Wyler filmed his homecoming to his wife Milly (Myrna Loy, top-billed) via a long tracking shot down the hallway that Wyler remembered from his own return to the service and the way his real-life wife, former actress Margaret Tallichet (whom he married in 1938 after his much more tempestuous relationship with Bette Davis ended), greeted him. Al has been put in charge of his bank’s small-loans department and his first action in that department is to give a $6,000 loan to a sharecropper-turned-servicemember named Novak (Dean White) so Novak can buy his own farm. Al’s boss, Mr. Milton (Ray Collins), chews him out for giving Novak a loan without security or collateral, and the incident fuels Al’s already accelerating alcohol consumption. (The more we see Al drink, the more we’re reminded that Fredric March was the first actor to play Norman Maine in A Star Is Born nine years earlier – and to anyone who’s watched a Thin Man movie, in which Loy and William Powell played a husband-and-wife detective team who drank like crazy, the odder it is to see Loy playing someone trying to get her husband not to drink.)

Fred Derry’s career as a drug-chain soda jerk and women’s perfume salesman comes to an abrupt end when he chews out and literally beats up a local fascist who comes into the store and lectures Fred that America fought World War II on the wrong side – he punches him out and the petty fascist’s fall breaks apart a glass display case. In a scene that’s been excerpted in countless documentaries about post-war Hollywood, Sam Goldwyn and the Academy Awards, Fred goes out to a scrapyard where the remnants of old B-17’s are awaiting dismantling – something already referenced in the opening scene in which the men had seen the aircraft graveyard from above and noted that some of the planes had never been flown: just built for the war and then scrapped as no longer needed when it was over (an obvious metaphor for the servicemembers themselves). Only a deus ex machina appears in the film of the man running the scrapyard, who explains that the planes are being melted down to make prefabricated houses for veterans. Fred talks the guy into hiring him for this work, and the film ends affirmatively with Fred and Peggy agreeing to get married as soon as Fred’s divorce comes through – and this scene takes place at Homer’s wedding to Wilma. The Best Years of Our Lives is hardly a perfect movie – one wishes it had had a stronger score composer than Hugo Friedhofer, but Wyler’s direction os spot-on, Gregg Toland’s cinematography is hauntingly beautiful (Toland did his best work with either Wyler or Orson Welles as his director).amd the actors, as usual in Wyler’s best films, seem to become their roles instead of just playing them.