Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

Skip to comments.

"The Best Years Of Our Lives" (1946) aircraft graveyard scene
Youtube ^ | 01/01/2016 | Boeing B-17 Resource

Posted on 03/16/2024 6:13:21 PM PDT by simpson96

The Best Years of Our Lives is a 1946 American drama film directed by William Wyler and starring Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo and Harold Russell. The film is about three United States servicemen re-adjusting to societal changes and civilian life after coming home from World War II. The three men come from different services with different ranks that do not correspond with their civilian social class backgrounds.

The film was a critical and commercial success. It won seven Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler), Best Actor (Fredric March), Best Supporting Actor (Harold Russell), Best Film Editing (Daniel Mandell), Best Adapted Screenplay (Robert E. Sherwood), and Best Original Score (Hugo Friedhofer).

In addition, Russell was also awarded an honorary Academy Award, the only time in history that two such awards were given for a single performance.

It was the highest-grossing film in the United States since the release of Gone with the Wind.

"The Best Years Of Our Lives" (1946) aircraft graveyard scene


TOPICS: TV/Movies
KEYWORDS: movies; ww2
Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-72 next last
To: Rummyfan

Scorned by his wife and unable to get a better job than working at the drug store. Was important in the war but now feels like a surplus human being standing in a field with all the other surplus equipment.

Powerful.


21 posted on 03/16/2024 7:31:11 PM PDT by DarrellZero
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 16 | View Replies]

To: simpson96

A great war movie with no scenes of war in it.

My pics

1. Sgt York
2. Paths of Glory
3. Apocalypse Now
4. Saving Private Ryan
5. Best years of Our Lives
6. Run Silent, Run Deep
7. Full Metal Jacket
8. Patton
9. 1917
10.The Big Red One

https://www.vulture.com/article/best-war-movies-ranked.html


22 posted on 03/16/2024 7:33:03 PM PDT by Az Joe (Live free or die)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Rummyfan

Well, I have seen that movie maybe 6 times or more. Great stuff.


23 posted on 03/16/2024 7:34:55 PM PDT by Responsibility2nd (A truth that’s told with bad intent, Beats all the lies you can invent ~ Wm. Blake)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 20 | View Replies]

To: DuncanWaring

Now that is so true. The 8th suffered more casualties than the Marines did in WW II. Of course, a lot bailed out and became POWs.


24 posted on 03/16/2024 7:41:18 PM PDT by Retain Mike ( Sat Cong)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 9 | View Replies]

To: T-Bird45

My experience was similar to yours. I’m a history buff, especially interested in 20th c American history, film history, and the two world wars. But this film...out of respect for its fans I’ll just stop there.


25 posted on 03/16/2024 7:46:50 PM PDT by Buttons12 ( )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 8 | View Replies]

To: simpson96

My wife and I watched scads of old movies together. Whenever this was on I called it Three Came Home. Of course, that was the name of another war movie.


26 posted on 03/16/2024 7:47:08 PM PDT by JohnnyP (Thinking is hard work (I stole that from Rush).)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: rlmorel
Harold John Avery Russel (January 14, 1914 – January 29, 2002) was an American World War II veteran. After losing his hands during his military service, Russell was cast in the epic drama film The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), which earned him an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor.

Source: Wikipedia: Harold Russell

I had watched the move quite recently (within the last year & thought I had remembered what was said either before or after the movie had played. I got lucky as I remembered correctly this time. 😋

27 posted on 03/16/2024 7:47:52 PM PDT by Robert DeLong
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 12 | View Replies]

To: DarrellZero

Homer was the veteran crippled when he lost both hands in the war. He so doubted his worth on returning home that he was not willing to marry his sweetheart because he felt he would burden her. In the airplane graveyard scene, Fred found himself sitting in the airplane’s nose, his “office” as a bombardier, but as the camera pulls back we see that the plane’s engines are missing, just like Homer’s severed hands. It tells us that Fred, like Homer, no longer feels that he has the same self-worth he did during the war. One’s wounds are visible, the other’s not, but no less crippling. Both must heal to recover the best years of their lives.


28 posted on 03/16/2024 7:50:09 PM PDT by PUGACHEV
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 21 | View Replies]

To: Rockingham

When they were breaking up all the B-17s and fighters, you could buy a surplus P-51 with a spare engine and a a tank of avgas for $2500. A B-17 was $5000.


29 posted on 03/16/2024 7:52:48 PM PDT by Blood of Tyrants ( "It is easier to fool people than to convince them they have been fooled."- Mark Twain)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 4 | View Replies]

To: simpson96

Myrna Loy, yum.


30 posted on 03/16/2024 7:53:42 PM PDT by Jolla
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Blood of Tyrants

In Martin Caidin’s book “Fork-Tailed Devil”, he mentions that a surplus P-38 could be bought at Kingman in 1946 for $1250, brand new. Hundreds were scrapped.


31 posted on 03/16/2024 8:11:48 PM PDT by HartleyMBaldwin
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 29 | View Replies]

To: simpson96; abigkahuna; willk; Rockingham; Robert DeLong; T-Bird45; DuncanWaring; ...
I thought this scene which I describe below was one of the most powerful of the movie:
Captain Fred Derry was a soda jerk before the war, and became a decorated bombardier in the air war over Germany. When he flew back to his town on a B-17 that was going to be scrapped, he meets up with two other discharged servicemen flying to the same place. One was a sailor who had been on a carrier that was sunken the Pacific and had both of his badly burned hands amputated, the other, and ex-banker-turned Army Sergeant who fought the Japanese on the islands in the Pacific.

Captain Derry was expert and brave in his service, but when he came back home, he couldn't find any work. He ends deciding to leave this typical American city behind, because it was a total dead end for him, and he concluded he just had to start anew somewhere else.

While waiting for a space available spot on any military plane leaving, he wanders around the grounds of the airport where thousands of planes are being flown in from all the theaters of war, being dismembered for scrap.

As he walks around the ghostly carcasses of planes that bore the wear and tear of the service they had provided, their stark, partially dismembered corpses no doubt brought to his mind the very human men like him that had fought in them.

And here they were-forgotten, grime covered, damaged, and worn, and forgotten-just like him.

He then comes across the elderly remains of a B-17, "Round Trip?" which had successfully carried various crews of 10 men sixty times into the blood spattered skies over Germany and brought them back home again. And here she was, her engines missing like amputated limbs, with the wires and tubes sticking out of the raw stumps on her wings, like so many arteries and veins that had been ripped off without anesthetic.

Captain Derry eyed this apparition before, with practiced expertise, hoisting himself into the black gaping hole in her fuselage where the main crew hatch had been, doing it effortlessly and nimbly as he had done hundreds of times before.

Inside, he surveyed the decaying old lady from the inside as she began to slowly decay from the ashes of war into the ashes of obscurity, and the dust of combat to the dust of oblivion.

He picked up old objects, covered with dirt and dust, brushed them off, briefly examining them before tossing them aside, as they were already meaningless.

Then he entered the nose of the plane, his old "office" as he put it, and sat down in the position he had assumed many times before as the lead bombardier in the lead plane. I thought this was one of the most powerful sequences in the film.

He habitually cranes his head to the side, as if he were peering out ahead of him for the landmarks on the ground would recognize as his target. The filthy plexiglass nose on this plane is not at all like the clean, clear view his ground crew had provided for him each time.

As he peers out, he is transported back in time.

He can hear the drone of the four Wright Cyclone engines, he can see the blue sky and white clouds ahead, and below, the impersonal, dark, and deadly earth filled with men who wished to kill him, his plane, and his crew. Lost in thought, the plexiglass in front of him is no longer scratched and opaque. He is transported back to a time where he was doing something meaningful and important, where his men filling his plane were filled with purposed, all of of them filled with a desire to do their job and not let down those around him, his battlefield just ahead of him as he advanced, the first man, in the first plane of a giant swarm of planes just like his followed obligingly along.

He remembered. He was the literal tip of the spear.

He could feel it, the vibration of the engines, and the slight buffeting as the plane pushed through the air. He could smell it, the smell of oil, hydraulic fluid, leather, and gasoline. He felt the emotions. The fear, the desire to do what he had been trained to do and not fail his crew, his squadron, and his country, all wrapped in a cloak of the unknown, what lay only minutes ahead.

Completely lost in the timeless instant where all he was in life, everything he knew, everything he had, was compressed into that one, long instant that went endlessly on and on in his heart and mind.

At that instant, the foreman walking by the plane looks up and sees Captain Derry there, his indistinct face behind the dirty plexiglass-motionless as he watched in his mind the landscape of Nazi Germany unfolding before him, reliving it, seeing it again with his sightless eyes.

The foreman yells at him, and Captain Derry is viciously snapped back to reality, transversing time in a harsh instant, back to the present. He clears his head, and exits, the bomber the way he came in.

Apologizing to the foreman, he strikes up a conversation with the foreman who had also served in the war, albeit in a different capacity, swirly flashing his contempt for those glamor boys of the sky who got to escape the mud and the filth of the ground far below them, but in that world of the Fall of 1945, the contempt means nothing to the man it is directed at.

All he wants to do is go on surviving, and to do that, he needs a job. And he gets one. Removing his jacket, rolling up his sleeves, he gets on with his life.


What struck me about this is the utter timelessness of this. This has been played out millions of times over history, in cultures all over the world. Though the technology and circumstances may change, what happens here, the transition from warrior to civilian, is at heart the same.

32 posted on 03/16/2024 8:14:59 PM PDT by rlmorel (In Today's Democrat America, The $5 Dollar Bill is the New $1 Dollar Bill.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Robert DeLong

I stand 100% corrected. I must have mixed him in my memory up with someone else. Thank you for setting that straight.


33 posted on 03/16/2024 8:16:34 PM PDT by rlmorel (In Today's Democrat America, The $5 Dollar Bill is the New $1 Dollar Bill.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 27 | View Replies]

To: simpson96

Bookmark


34 posted on 03/16/2024 8:24:20 PM PDT by Southside_Chicago_Republican (The more I learn about people, the more I like my dog. )
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: simpson96

In a related topic , Masters of the Air is a great series on Apple TV


35 posted on 03/16/2024 8:28:07 PM PDT by HereInTheHeartland (Have you seen Joe Biden's picture on a milk carton?)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: Taxman

ping


36 posted on 03/16/2024 8:33:08 PM PDT by Taxman ((SAVE AMERICA! VOTE REPUBLICAN IN 2024! SAVE AMERICA!))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 1 | View Replies]

To: willk

My bet is Kingman.


37 posted on 03/16/2024 8:33:48 PM PDT by Taxman ((SAVE AMERICA! VOTE REPUBLICAN IN 2024! SAVE AMERICA!))
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 3 | View Replies]

To: rlmorel

first time i watched it, that graveyard freaked me right out...

i’d never even thought such a thing possible


38 posted on 03/16/2024 8:34:05 PM PDT by Chode (there is no fall back position, there's no rally point, there is no LZ... we're on our own. #FJB)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 32 | View Replies]

To: abigkahuna

Yes. I have no idea where that had formed in my memory. No disrespect to that man, for sure.


39 posted on 03/16/2024 8:36:56 PM PDT by rlmorel (In Today's Democrat America, The $5 Dollar Bill is the New $1 Dollar Bill.)
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 13 | View Replies]

To: rlmorel

That has never happened to me. If you believe that I have a bridge for sale in Brooklyn, cheap. 🤣


40 posted on 03/16/2024 8:45:20 PM PDT by Robert DeLong
[ Post Reply | Private Reply | To 33 | View Replies]


Navigation: use the links below to view more comments.
first previous 1-2021-4041-6061-72 next last

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.

Free Republic
Browse · Search
General/Chat
Topics · Post Article

FreeRepublic, LLC, PO BOX 9771, FRESNO, CA 93794
FreeRepublic.com is powered by software copyright 2000-2008 John Robinson