On Tues. night, I was fed up with the primary coverage in which they kept projecting winners despite the fact that the polls hadn’t closed yet, so I switched to TCM just at the start of THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946). It’s three hours long and I wound up watching the whole thing, not having seen it in its entirety in many long years. What a movie. So filled with moments of believable human behavior. The whole first hour is devoted to first, the return trip by airplane of three WWII veterans to their hometown, Boone City and second, their first day and night in town. Exploring their acclimation to being home again after three or four years. Time is devoted to things that filmmakers today would speed up somehow. E.g. Homer, who lost his hands in the war, uses the metal claws he has to take out matches and light cigarettes for all three on the plane. “Anyone superstitious?” “No, go ahead.” “Well, I am” and he proceeds to take out another match and light it. All in real time. Later that night, when two of the three vets, Al and Fred, have gotten drunk and been brought to Al’s home by Al’s wife and daughter, we see the two women each putting a drunken man to bed and all the little motions and arrangements and struggles with clothes and flopping body parts that are part of that. Exploring the moments. And dramatically interesting because of the underlying tensions:
1) a wife dealing with her husband in less than an ideal state after not seeing him for years and
2) a young woman sort of strangely attracted to a man she just met and having to show a far greater degree of intimacy with him (taking his shoes off, loosening his clothes, tucking him in) than should be expected. And a hint of what lies ahead for them.

And you’ve got Gregg Toland’s deep focus photography and William Wyler’s long takes with lots of stuff going on in the frame, e.g. the bar scene where Homer (Harold Russell) and his uncle (Hoagy Carmichael) play the piano together for Al (Frederic March), while Al is distracted by keeping tabs on Fred (Dana Andrews), who’s off in the corner in the phone booth calling up Al’s daughter (Teresa Wright) to break things off, at Al’s stern request. All seen in one shot. And all in focus.

In talking about this film with a friend, I got some feedback that addresses the issue that came into my head of why no one makes films like this anymore. One of the reasons the filmmakers could get away with a three-hour drama like this at the time is because it treated a subject that was familiar to the entire audience. Everybody in America watching this film knew somebody who’d come back from the war. People were eager to see a dramatization of how others were coping. E.g., the time spent on showing Homer lighting the matches reflected the inherent interest of everyone watching. And, besides, it was made by people who’d been in the war. Wyler, for instance, accompanied the Memphis Belle on bombing runs and made a celebrated documentary about it. In BEST YEARS, Fred had been a bombardier.

One can quibble about the idealized portrayal of the women in the film, even Virginia Mayo’s perfect “bad girl” (Fred’s wayward wife). She’s so charming (and so right in all the little behavioral details) you can’t help but fall for her anyway. But there are those Teresa Wright closeups that speak volumes without dialogue. They could have cut that whole “I’m going to break up that marriage” exchange and just replaced it with some closeups that would have said it all. And wouldn’t we all like to have a wife like Myrna Loy? However, Cathy O’Donnell, a newcomer making her debut, is a little too earnest and saintly as Wilma, Homer’s devoted girlfriend, and easily the most idealized character in the film. Her scenes with Homer, as emotional as they are, tend to take the movie out of its realistic mode. But they’re always brought back by Russell’s total authenticity. (It was his movie debut as well. And he really did lose his hands in the war.)

One can also quibble about the way the deck is stacked against the men who stayed at home, e.g. the store managers at the drugstore who make Fred’s life miserable, the overbearing bank president that Al works for, Wilma’s blustering father who makes sweeping statements about the dire economy looming ahead, and the right-winger at the drugstore counter who rants about “pure Americanism” and provokes a fight with Homer. Most of these characters veer a little too close to caricature, undermining the honesty of the main characters’ portrayal.

As I was watching it, I was thinking early on about how the film may be glossing over the trauma of the men’s war experiences, but that thought was followed immediately by the scene of Fred having the nightmare about the bomber getting hit and freaking out in bed in Al’s home, a scene I’d forgotten about and which addressed the issue quite adequately after all.

It’s quite an emotional movie for me, maybe the one that moves me to tears in the most places of any movie I’ve ever seen.

(And a welcome change of pace from the other stuff I’ve been watching lately, e.g. just about every Shaw Bros. movie with “Swordsman” or “Clan” in the title. But then, the intensity of BEST YEARS is not something I can handle every day.)

Well-considered, and a great film. My movie-watching group took in the war-set SINCE YOU WENT AWAY a few years back; a different kind of a picture, but equally stirring. The recent Iraq/homefront-set HOME OF THE BRAVE is an attempt at a picture like these, and not a bad one.

I watched on Tuesday as well. It had been probably five years or so since I saw it and it was just as effective. I agree with Brian that it's one of those films that just doesn't get made anymore. In fact, I would find it pretty hard to even come close to anything like it today which is pretty sad. A really great film.

It is indeed a great film, and I even love Cathy O'Donnell in it. Others have noted that she tended to play frail characters in her films, including her last two pictures TERROR IN THE HAUNTED HOUSE (aka MY WORLD DIES SCREAMING) and BEN-HUR. However, I find her equally memorable in an uncharacteristically "tough" performance in THEY LIVE BY NIGHT.

I haven't listened to Farley Granger's audio track for the DVD of THEY LIVE BY NIGHT, so I wonder if he liked working with her? They also co-starred in SIDE STREET, which is the co-feature on that disc.

I love the movie, and Cathy O'Donnell almost especially.

I'd say that Cathy O'Donnell is my favorite pre-1950s actress (she continued into the fifties, but began her career in the forties). Of her films that I've seen, I always found her memorable, other than the troubled production THE LOVE OF THREE QUEENS (I hope that it really wasn't Edgar Ulmer who directed that film). To me, she retired from the screen far too early.