Pic courtesy: https://www.rogerebert.com
William Wyler’s ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ (1946) tells the story of three war veterans who return home, unsure about everything that they had left behind when they embarked on their duties in uniform. Al Stephenson is the eldest of the three, an army man and ex-banker; Fred Derry is a bomber pilot, a self-taught, self-made enterprising young man, with no particular vocation to seek refuge in; Homer Parrish is a Navy man who has lost some both his hands and much of his confidence, staring at what seems like a hapless life seeped in the anxiety over the quality of support from family and friends, how much of it would be wilful and how much of it obligatory. On the face of it, the uneasy homecoming poses different challenges, but the deeply unnerving hurt of the oozing wounds is equally crippling for all three. And yet, the Film beautifully ends on a note of organic hope, which leaves the viewer reeling in the effect of the tragic optimism that Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche patented: “Tragic optimism is the mood of the strong man who seeks intensity and extent of experience even at the cost of woe and is delighted to find that strife is the law of life.”
All three principal players - Fredric March as Al, Dana Andrews as Captain Fred Derry, and Harold Russell as Homer Parrish - offer a priceless acting masterclass for anyone who wants to move up the value chain of film portrayals. The last mentioned was actually a World War II veteran who lost both his hands in the course of service. An ‘untrained actor’, his performance is a case study that film schools minting money from unsuspecting aspirants should learn from. If watch Fredric deliver a rousing speech in an inebriated state and Dana ruminating over his flying days in the cockpit of a discarded warplane, they will know a lot more about what acting should be all about.
Talk of iconic cinema and they go gaga over films like ‘Citizen Kane’ and ‘How Green Was My Valley’, both great works of art no doubt, but sadly marred by mediocre acting and a generous sprinkling of inadvertently comic frames. The praise reserved for this seamlessly flawless and unarguably timeless films in mainstream circuits is surprisingly guarded, and the reason is amply clear. Wyler refrains from underlining situations and character viewpoints (that studios crave for and the audience is taught to lap up) and instead lets Robert Shrewood’s brilliant screenplay unleash itself in a discernibly matter-of-fact recitation, steering clear of accentuating the drama of life, which in itself is a wholesome theatre of the absurd, awkward, average, and awe-inspiring all rolled into one epic narrative. Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography helps us peel off layers of meaning that show more and tell less, God sent for a film of this genre. This simply profound approach to storytelling hardly provides the right motivation to construct a blockbuster review with outlandish labels like ‘Must Watch’, ‘Unmissable’ and the like.
Hearteningly, ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’ was the first film to win eight Academy Awards - best picture, best actor (March), best director, best screenplay, best editing and best score. Harold Russell picked up two Oscars for the same role, one honorary and one for best supporting actors. Oscars indeed rose to the occasion for a change! Hope they do that more often.
