'Making The Best Years of Our Lives' by Alison Macor
Some wounds of war can’t be treated in a field hospital. Some are invisible and others become apparent only after the veteran returns home.
The Best Years of Their Lives (1946) remains a brilliant and very real dramatization of the physical and psychological challenges faced by the survivors of war. Alison Macor, formerly the film critic for the Austin Chronicle, has written a book-length study of the film, Making The Best Years of Their Lives: The Hollywood Classic that Inspired a Nation. For once, in a publishing industry increasingly given to hyperbole, the subtitle is true.
This remarkable film was almost never made, due to Hollywood concerns over dwindling public interest, once World War II had ended, in any movie concerned with the war. But The Best Years struck a chord for its depiction of the war’s impact on millions of returning servicemen (women served but seldom near combat) and their families. Among the skeptics was the film’s screenwriter, Franklin Roosevelt’s speechwriter Robert Sherwood, who soldiered on despite doubts and delivered a solid foundation for the film.
However, Sherman’s words in the hands of an uninspired cast and crew might have resulted in a competently forgettable film (TCM, 2 a.m. material). The Best Year’s energy comes from director William Wyler, a Signal Corps veteran who flew B-17 bombing runs over Germany with camera in hand. His mission was to document a bomber squadron in action. Rather than confine himself to base in England, he flew with his subjects into the jaws of German flack and fighter planes.
Wartime combat left Wyler nearly deaf in one ear, and one of The Best Year’s stars, Harold Russel (playing the sailor Homer Parrish), with a pair of hooks for hands. For returning Sgt. Al Stephenson (Frederic March) and his wife Milly (Myrna Loy), Wyler drew on his own postwar reunion with his wife. Like the Wylers and the Stephensons, many homecomings were strained as couples struggled to overcome uncertainty over the changes they had experienced during their years apart. Other couples resembled Capt. Fred and Marie Derry (Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo). Married in a patriotic-romantic fever before Fred shipped off to war, they were never well suited. Their problem is compounded by Fred’s recurring nightmares. It was called combat fatigue back then, the worrisome condition that now has the more clinically precise name of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The authenticity of The Best Years of Their Lives was striking at the time of its release and has lost none of its emotional power. Alison Macor’s fascinating book details many factors that converged to make one of Hollywood’s greatest films about war and its aftermath.
Making The Best Years of Their Lives: The Hollywood Classic that Inspired a Nation is published by University of Texas Press.
