Fred: You gotta hand it to the Navy. They sure trained that kid how to use those hooks.
Al: They couldn’t train him to put his arms around his girl or stroke her hair.
– Al Stephenson (Fredric March) and Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), discuss fellow veteran Homer Parrish’s return home, The Best Years of Our Lives.
While The Best Years of Our Lives is a great movie, it sure has some shitty posters. This one plays up the sex appeal of Fred’s horrible wife and ignores two of the three main characters!
The Oscars infatuation with socially conscious films continued in 1946, when they awarded the Best Picture trophy to The Best Years of Our Lives, a very powerful film dealing with the problems faced by veterans returning home from World War II. Before I watched this, I was expecting some maudlin soapboxing, but I was surprised to find this is an excellent movie. The movie employs subtlety – like a glance or wince from a character – to detail their inner turmoil, instead of something more heavy-handed, like the sort of outrageous moments in The Lost Weekend. Things that could have been played up as way too sappy – like a veteran who lost both his hands in the war – are instead treated in a positive and gentle manner. Most of all, The Best Years of Our Lives is a very human story with a lot of compelling characters dealing with real problems in real ways, problems that are still resonant in the fallout of today’s wars.
The three leads – Best Supporting Actor Harold Russell, Dana Andrews, and Best Actor Fredric March.
The story focuses on three returning vets: Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) was a fighter pilot who is returning home to a far less glamorous life; the middle-aged Al Stephenson (Best Actor Winner Fredric March), who was an infantryman and is now returning to his family and his old banking job; and Homer Parrish (Best Supporting Actor Harold Russell), a sailor who lost both his hands and now has hooks (which he is very adept as using), but is unsure how his family and girlfriend will react to them. All immediately face problems when they return. They feel isolated from their families, who they have been away from for three or more years and don’t really understand the struggles they went through overseas (Al’s son, for example, quizzes his father on the variety of guns and tanks he saw, not seeing them as instruments of death but as curiosities he learned about in school). For Derry, who was a leader of men, the return to being a soda jerk is particularly soul crushing. He married a woman he barely knew in basic training and the two can barely stand each other now that the war is over. Al turns to the bottle to deal with the stress of his home life and his job – where the bank he works for is trying to skate the requirements of the GI bill and not give loans to some of Al’s fellow servicemen. And Homer is faced with the stares and unease of his family and friends as they try to cope with his handicap.
As noted, the movie’s director – William Wyler – does an excellent job with subtlety and uses non-spoken moments to powerful effect. There’s a tremendous scene early on where Homer returns home. As he waves goodbye to Al and Fred, his jack sleeve slips down, fully revealing his hooks for the first time. His family stares in bewilderment and then Homer’s mother slowly starts to cry. Nothing is said, nor needs to be said. The effect on every person in the scene is evident just from the shot.
The powerful bedroom scene where Harold finally fully exposes his handicap to girlfriend Wilma.
Homer Parrish is the best and most interesting part of the movie. Played by an actual World War II veteran and amputee, Harold Russell gives Homer dignity. Although he sometimes falls prey to self-pity, Homer is a very likable guy who really tries to see the best in all situations. His story is sometimes given short shrift to Al and Fred’s family dramas and when he’s not in the movie, I kept wishing he’d show up more. Towards the end of the film, he finally confronts his longtime girlfriend, Wilma. He takes her up to his room to show her how his hooks really work and how helpless he is without them (it’s for the audience’s benefit too – we’d never seen Homer without his hooks before this scene). When Wilma bravely helps him undress, it’s a very powerful and fulfilling scene.
The movie sometimes falls prey to soap opera plots – there’s a very drawn out romantic subplot between Fred and Al’s daughter – but ultimately this movie is very moving and I felt pretty realistic in handling the issues of veterans.
Trivia: Harold Russell was nominated for Best Supporting Actor, but the academy was worried the unknown actor would not win. Not wanting to send an amputee home empty-handed (no pun intended), Russell was given a Special Oscar “for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance.” However the Academy misjudged one of the most powerful forces in Oscar voting – the sympathy vote – and Russell won the competitive award as well, making him the only person to win two Oscars for the same performance.
Fun Fact: The trailer for The Best Years of Our Lives actually promotes it as “THE BEST THING THAT HAS EVER HAPPENED.” While it’s certainly a good movie, this might be taking things a bit too far.
Operation: Oscar 