The Realism In Regards To The Mannerisms Of The Military Members Of WWII, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Sixty two years ago, Samuel Goldwyn-William Wyler film, The Best Years of Our Lives provided a unique sense of realism in regards to the mannerisms of the military members of WWII. It showed remarkably honest depiction of returning World War II veterans, and of the impact of their return upon the veterans, their families, friends, and loved ones, and postwar society at large. (Hardwick, Schnepf, 3) In all these respects, it continues to strike us as an extraordinary production for its historical moment risking its candor of cultural critique on Americans still proud of a unified national war effort and in the same moment already hearkening to the repressive overtures of the Cold War Right. Indeed, in the calm realism of the movie's concentration on problems likely to be encountered by a cross-section of convincingly representative figures, one might contend that three major American wars and a number of overseas adventures later, we have yet to see its equal.

Moreover, intertwined with this story of the film's unusual success is also a production history perhaps as curious as any recorded for an American popular classic: a process actually beginning, as will be more fully shown, with more than a year of bitter combat ahead for Americans, in the producer Samuel Goldwyn's enthusiastic reading of an August 1944 Time magazine article on returning veterans; and concluding, just before the film's late 1946 release, with the entitling of the as-yet unnamed project by popular vote from a number of choices offered to test audiences. In between to give but a sketch of events also more fully detailed below Goldwyn would commission the historical novelist McKinlay Kantor to write a film treatment based on the article. The assignment so conceived would result instead in Glory for Me, a novel in the form of a narrative poem. That strange artifact would then be converted into a screenplay by the prospective director, William Wyler, with playwright and former Roosevelt advisor-speechwriter Robert Sherwood. In turn, with further changes by Goldwyn and others, it would be filmed by Wyler with an ensemble including actors Fredric March, Myrna Loy, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia Mayo, Hoagy Carmichael, and, in the role of a maimed veteran, a military amputee named Harold Russell. And after that, the rest would become, as they say, movie legend. The film in its first release would earn eight million dollars. It would receive a total of seven academy awards. Two of these would go to the non-actor Russell the only time to date in which a performer has been thus honored.

Attempting to assimilate this complicated set of cultural and commercial vectors, what follows is a history of that production, a particular act of remembering. As is invariably the case with the World War II popular classic, however, the real product ultimately at issue will be America remembering itself. (Norden, 25-36)

To begin with a number of converging accounts, ...