Classic Flicks: Best Years

By Joseph Allencherril     2/24/11 6:00pm

If you're one for Oscar trivia, check out a list of winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture from decades ago. The Academy has always had a knack for either failing to nominate or failing to choose from the nominees the truly best films of the year, a grand tradition which continues to this day. I have noticed a correlation in the context of these films: commercial success and artistic quality are quite often inversely related. For both of these reasons, I have always been skeptical of William Wyler's 1946 film The Best Years of Our Lives, which became the highest grossing film in the United States since Gone with the Wind. In addition, it received seven Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. But seeing The Best Years of Our Lives on so many great films lists annoyed me into setting my Oscar and commercial success prejudices aside and at least giving the ?film a watch.

Watching The Best Years of Our Lives turned out to be one of the best film decisions of my life. I popped in the DVD expecting to see a sappy, sentimental, quarter-funny flick about life in the '40s. But what ended up gracing my TV screen was one of the best World War II films I have ever seen. However, there were no spilled intestines, there were no Nazis and there were not even any soldiers in combat. Instead, there was just pure emotion.

The film follows Fred Derry (Dana Andrews, The Pilot), Homer Parrish (Harold Russell, Dogtown) and Al Stephenson (Frederic March, Inherit the Wind), three demobilized World War II servicemen who meet during a flight home to Boone City, a fictional town reminiscent of Cincinnati. The men come from very different walks of life: Homer is an ex-quarterback, Fred is a soda jerk, and Al is a bank executive. But all three have difficulty readjusting to civilian life.

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I think it is the character of Homer Parrish that really makes the film memorable. This is no surprise when one considers that Russel was an actual Canadian-American World War II veteran who lost his hands in an explosion during military training. (So yes, that means the prosthetic hooks are real.) Keep this fact in mind as you watch the film - it adds a profound layer of psychological realism to the film. When Homer tells his fiancée Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell, They Live by Night) that he does not want her to serve a crippled man for the rest of her life, he really means it. Now that's not acting - as Sartre would say, that's being.

Another notable element of the film is the deep focus cinematography of Gregg Toland, the daring visionary who also played a major role in making Orson Welles' Citizen Kane. Through modern eyes, Toland's work might seem rather unremarkable, but this is only because his groundbreaking technique of keeping both distant and close objects in sharp focus is a much-used tool in the repertoire of cinematographers working today. Unfortunately, The Best Years of Our Lives was the last film to feature Toland's work before his untimely death in 1948.

Oscar trivia: Harold Russell, the actor who plays Homer Parrish, holds the well-deserved distinction of being the only person to receive two Oscars for the same role. Russell received an honorary Oscar for what the academy called "bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans" because it was believed that he had little chance of actually winning the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor. This once again proves the Academy's lack of film sense, as Russell ended up receiving that award as well. Russell was also one of only two non-professional actors to win an Oscar for acting; the other is Dr. Haing Ngor, who played Dith Pran in 1985 Vietnam war film The Killing Fields. On a darker note, Russell had to sell one of his Oscars to help pay for his wife's medical bills decades later. He died in 2002.

Joseph Allencherril is a Will Rice College sophomore. Classic Flicks is a column reexamining and rediscovering the best that cinema has to offer.

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