The Best Years of Our Lives

TCM has been showing movies in honor of Memorial Day since this past Friday evening. Its Memorial Day Marathon continues through this evening until early tomorrow morning. It kicked off its observance on Friday with the showing of The Best Years of Our Lives.

Jack Fowler writes about the marathon in “Making Memorial Day with movies.” Peggy Noonan singled out The Best Years of Our Lives in her Wall Street Journal column “Memorial Day and the Best Movies of Our Lives.” I want to draw from my previously posted comments on the movie to recall it briefly with a little background provided by Mark Harris.

Harris tells the highly improbable story behind the making of the film in Five Came Back, his terrific account of the prominent directors who volunteered to use their filmmaking skills in the armed forces during the World War II (John Ford, William Wyler, John Huston, Frank Capra, and George Stevens). Harris’s account of The Best Years of Our Lives offers a sort of capstone to the story.

The film tells the story of three veterans returning from the war. The idea for the film was Samuel Goldwyn’s; he commissioned MacKinlay Kantor to write a screenplay. Instead Kantor turned in a treatment in blank verse.

Goldwyn somehow thought to solicit playwright and Roosevelt confidant Robert Sherwood to draft a screenplay based on Kantor’s treatment. Sherwood declined, but Goldwyn persisted. Goldwyn also turned to William Wyler — one of the five who came back in Harris’s telling — to direct. Wyler enlisted the great cinematographer Gregg Toland to film it, and Toland’s contribution was invaluable.

Wyler had virtually lost his hearing while serving on the Memphis Belle in Europe during the war. TCM showed Wyler’s 1944 documentary The Memphis Belle in its marathon yesterday. It is posted here on YouTube.

Wyler jumped at Goldwyn’s offer and worked with Sherwood to shape the screenplay. Indeed, as Harris demonstrates, Wyler poured himself into the film and each of its three leading characters. “As they collaborated,” Harris writes, “The Best Years of Our Lives gradually evolved into Wyler’s own story.”

If you’ve seen the film, you haven’t forgotten the performance of Harold Russell. While serving as an Army instructor, Russell had lost his hands handling explosives in a training accident. In the film his efforts to return to his prewar life hold a special challenge.

Goldwyn doubted that they would be able to find an amputee to play the role and said so in his pungent style: “You can’t have a Jew playing a Jew, it wouldn’t work on screen.” The disabled veterans visited by Wyler in search of the right man to play the part shared Goldwyn’s skepticism.

Wyler found Russell in a documentary made during the war. The documentary is posted online here. Harris quotes Russell’s words in the documentary: “I got [my injury] on D-Day, all right, but it was in North Carolina when half a pound of TNT exploded ahead of schedule. I didn’t have a German scalp hanging from my belt. I didn’t have a Purple Heart. I didn’t even have an overseas ribbon. All I had was no hands.” It wasn’t long before he had an Academy Award (actually, two of them) for his performance in the film, which swept the Oscars for 1946.

Below is a clip depicting former bombardier Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) confronting his demons. Like Wyler, Fred flew B17s in the war. They didn’t have a word for PTSD at the time, but Fred was wrestling with it.

Over the weekend I confessed to Jack Fowler that I’ve seen the movie over and over and it still chokes me up. Jack let me know he has me beat: “I’ve seen Best Years probably 40 times.” He added: “I think Frederic March plays the best non-comic drunk in any movie. The mom choking up when she sees her son’s hands…yeah, I choke up then too. Every time. Every scene is great…I love when Teresa Wright’s hat falls of at the end — she was in the moment.”

When I walked in to Spaulding Auditorium to see the film as a college student, I had never heard of The Best Years of Our Lives. When I left the auditorium a few hours later, I couldn’t believe I had never heard of it. If you haven’t seen the film, I hope this may incite your interest. If you’ve seen the film, I hope this may add a bit to your appreciation.

This is the first year in a long time I did not attend a Memorial Day observation.

I was so angry last year when I went to the one in my town, and they had Leftists getting up on stage talking about their favorite movies about war, how we had to protect our nation from the events of January 6th, etc. It was all I could do to not stand up (I was sitting in the Veterans section at the front) and turn my back on these people.

These Leftist politicians had no idea what Memorial Day is, and why we observe it. I appreciate movies of all kinds, but a Memorial Day Observation in a public setting by a official of the town government is not the place to air them.

I will probably return next year. But I am so disgusted with the leadership in this town that I am worried I might not have as much self-control this year as I did last year. Me making a scene would detract even further from the meaning of this day.

So, here is one of my favorite scenes from this movie which I do think about often. It is relevant because this specific character, Fred Derry, saw the loss of those we mourn and express our national thanks to on this day, and was obviously haunted by his experience...as many men were. 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 rot 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, with the ever-present and never ending droning of the four Wright Cyclone engines as they had carried him into the blue skies over Germany.

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.

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.