The Best Years of Our Lives

In honor of Veterans Day today TCM will play The Best Years of Our Lives this afternoon at 5:00 p.m. (Eastern). 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 excellent 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. Wyler’s 1944 documentary The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress is posted on YouTube.

Wyler jumped at Goldwyn’s offer and worked with Sherwood to shape the screenplay. Indeed, as Harris demonstrates, Wyler poured himself each of the film’s 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 on YouTube 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.

Earlier this year 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 off at the end — she was in the moment.” Hoagy Carmichael is at the piano in the scene (below).

In his interview with Coleman Hughes this week (posted here on YouTube), Victor Davis Hanson recalled the scene in which Homer Parrish’s loss of his arms is denigrated in front of Fred by the soda fountain customer who earnestly instructs Homer, “We fought the wrong people, that’s all.”

Homer asks him, “Look here, Mister, what are you selling, anyway?” The customer claims not to be selling anything but “plain, old-fashioned Americanism.”

Fred is the soda jerk working behind the counter. He comes to Homer’s defense, jumping over the counter to deck the customer. He explains to his boss as he strips off his apron, “Don’t say it, chum. The customer is always right, but this customer wasn’t right.” I thought until recently that this scene might be unrealistic, but Tucker Carlson has made it real.

The Best Years of Our Lives" is my favorite movie. Ever, bar none.

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 (played perfectly by Dana Andrews) was 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 process.

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.

I salute all who served us on this day, and thank all of them from the bottom of my heart.

I agree with you, rl. I also love the timelessness of it all. The men returning home are the same men who returned home throughout history, before history, and in times lost to history, and the women who waited for them and welcomed them home are the same women.

I always liked Dana Andrews. I love the way he hoisted himself into the fuselage hole and the effortless and nimble way he did it. I wondered if he had been working out at the gym, but people didn't work out in those days as they do today.

I love men to whom I can relate and whom I admire and respect--in the movies and in real life. We all do. I still love Johnny Weismuller--the real Tarzan--whom I idolized as a child. At play with my friends, I always wanted to be Tarzan. Men love being men, just as women love being women, and we love other men whom we admire and respect.

Another bright shining star in the movie is gorgeous Virginia Mayo, another of my favorites. Someone here on Free Republic who knew her personally said that in real life she was a lovely, beautiful, gracious, and kind as came across in her movies (the unlikeable character she played in The Best Years of Our Lives notwithstanding).

Two other good movies in which Dana Andrews triumphed are The Purple Heart (1944) and State Fair, another of my favorites, with beautiful, wonderful Jeanne Crain, who's up there with Virginia Mayo in my admiration.

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