Favorite movie of all time: The Best Years of Our Lives. I have one criticism, that they made Marie Derry such a horrible woman. The scenes of her acting crass and uncaring are wonderful but I think women deserve better than to be cast either as loyal or as trollops. I would prefer that Marie and Fred be mismatched less along the lines of she bad.
That said, it’s Fred’s story that leaves me in tears. Raised on the literal wrong side of the tracks by an alcoholic father, he becomes an ‘officer and a gentleman’, a bombardier in the 8th Air Force. I break up at the scene where his broken down father, having said goodbye (again) to his son – who is leaving town to make a new start – reads aloud a citation he’s found in his son’s papers. There’s a cigarette in his hand, an open, mostly empty bottle in front of him, and his voice breaks as he reads of his son’s heroism. The literalism of the scene works.
Another criticism is a quibble, the final speech about how hard it will be for him and Peggy is nonsense and you in the audience know it because she’s that wonderful – thank you, Theresa Wright for Peggy and for Charlie Newton in Shadow of a Doubt – and Peggy’s father is a Vice President of the city’s major bank. Noble words but all I really wanted to hear from him is something like ‘since the moment I met you, you’ve been the best part of my life. I love you. I’ll do anything to make you happy.’ I wanted intimacy, not a speech about struggle.
I sometimes think Wilma is miscast, but she’s a thin reed of a character, the loyal, devoted home town girl. I wish that role were more developed too. Only Peggy and Myrna Loy’s Milly are treated as real people with real concerns. I think it would have been great to see Peggy as a less actressy, less vocally polished, more hometown character. The actress, Cathy O’Donnell, is reed thin, which helps. I think casting Wilma must have been very difficult considering she’s playing off an actual double amputee non-actor. Harold Russell lost his arms in a training accident and was cast when he appeared in a movie about rehabilitating the wounded.
It’s important this many years on to put in perspective what these men’s histories say about their experiences. Fred was a bombardier. There’s a photo he shows Marie of his plane in action, taken from another plane. She asks what those are and he says, ‘Little black flowers that grow in the sky’, meaning anti-aircraft fire exploding around him. She at one point asks him about his dreams, why he keeps yelling for guys to get out, not realizing he was watching his friends die in their plane. This is one of the reasons I would love for her to be more human, less of a selfish caricature. There’s no reason a whirlwind romance and marriage would survive. It didn’t need to be so callously defined.
Homer lost his hands when his small aircraft carrier was sunk. Think about what that means: his hands burnt off, tossed into the ocean along with hundreds of wounded and dead friends and shipmates, surviving God knows how, and to live unable to open the door if it blows closed at night because he has no hands.
Al’s story is just as specific. He was in the 25 Infantry Division. That unit relieved the Marines on Guadalcanal and went through horrific fighting as the Japanese risked almost everything to win. They then fought through much of the rest of the war, from Vella Lavella to Luzon. And he was a sergeant, not an officer with officer privilege. The words ‘combat veteran’ apply: tough as nails, willing to stick a knife in your ribs in a fight to the death.
So we have Fred in the air, Homer at sea and Al on land, the three theaters of war.
jomi: playing with perception 