The Best Years of Our Lives

Sarah Kozloff

• Publisher: British Film Institute
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781844573264
• eBook ISBN: 9781838718480
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film & Video

William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) tells the story of three veterans returning from World War II and adjusting to civilian life in a manner unusual for classical Hollywood cinema, with melodrama leavened by authentic detail, personal memories and a fierce desire to capture its historical moment. Sarah Kozloff's illuminating study of the film traces the contribution of Wyler (himself injured while serving in the US Air Force), Robert Sherwood's screenplay, Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography, Hugo Friedhofer's award-winning score, and the ensemble cast of Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright and Harold Russell. The film's poignant message spoke to American audiences reeling from the end of the conflict and the bumpy transition to peace: producer Samuel Goldwyn received hundreds of letters from ex-servicemen about how accurately his production had captured their experiences. Despite winning nine Academy Awards, Best Years was soon engulfed in political conflict from both the right and the left. Disagreements about the film's politics foreshadowed HUAC's anti-Communist investigations and the fracturing of the Hollywood community that culminated in the collapse of the studio system. Sarah Kozloff's discussion of the film's development, production and reception history draws on archival research to shed new light on our understanding of this much-loved movie, and to bring The Best Years of Our Lives back where it belongs: in our collections, in our libraries, and in our hearts.

1 Historical Context

Studio scripts often invented mythical countries or set their stories in some airbrushed past or unspecified present. Few films sought to engage with their historical moment as deeply as Best Years.

National and International Affairs

Best Years was created over a twenty-eight-month period, from August 1944 until its New York premiere in November 1946. Thus, it was conceived, produced and distributed during the climactic end of World War II and the transition to the post-war era.

Producer Sam Goldwyn commissioned Best Years a few months after the Allied invasion of Normandy, when the end of the war and the return of the soldiers suddenly seemed in view. The first screenwriter, MacKinlay Kantor, wrote his version during the Battle of the Bulge (when the Germans nearly broke through American lines in Belgium and snatched victory away from the Allies), and turned in his draft while the firebombing of Tokyo and the Battle of Iwo Jima raged. To the movie’s original audiences the battle sites casually mentioned in throwaway dialogue – Okinawa, Iwo Jima, Leyte Gulf, Hiroshima, Dusseldorf – are not dry historical facts, but hallowed names.

Goldwyn initially approached Robert Sherwood to rewrite the project on 4 April 1945. Eight days later, Franklin Delano Roosevelt passed away, a loss that profoundly affected the country as a whole, and Sherwood personally, since he had been part of the President’s inner circle for many years. Late in April 1945 military forces liberated Dachau and Buchenwald, and the world was forced to face journalistic, photographic and filmic evidence of a level of atrocity previously unimagined. Yet the Allies’ mood shifted from grief and shock to euphoria a few weeks later on 8 May when Victory in Europe was declared.

The War in the Pacific, however, was still ongoing and the US was making plans to invade Japan when director William Wyler became attached to the project in July 1945. Robert Sherwood finally signed a contract on 14 August 1945 – just days after the US dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima (6 August) and Nagasaki (9 August) and the world gasped at the destruction that ensued.

On the international scene, once World War II ended, the immense scale of the damage became apparent. Europe was strewn with rubble and crucial infrastructure destroyed. An acute world food shortage – especially in Asia and Europe – developed. The situation was so grim that in the spring of 1946 Pope Pius proclaimed, ‘The shadow of famine rests on at least a quarter of the entire population of the globe.’⁵ (In Best Years, the farmer, Novak [Dean White], tells Al, ‘With the food shortage all over the world it seems to me that farming’s about the most important work there is.’)

Sherwood was writing the script and debating each scene with Goldwyn and Wyler through the autumn of 1945 and winter months of 1946. Food was not the problem here (the US was a major exporter); the chief domestic challenge facing the country at the time was demobilisation. The War Department had established a points system for determining the order in which servicemen would be released from duty and provided transport home. But since there were 7.6 million American military personnel stationed overseas at the end of hostilities, the job was enormous and the process and speed of demobilisation pleased no one. Civilians heartsick for their loved ones created over 200 ‘Bring Back Daddy’ clubs and bombarded authorities with pleas and sent them pairs of baby shoes. The generals’ decisions to keep troops in unstable areas, the War Department’s bureaucracy, a severe shortage of ships and railway snafus led to great frustration. Servicemen waiting in overseas outposts took to the streets in angry protests; the near ‘mutiny’ in Manila of 20,000 servicemen in January 1946 demonstrated their sharp discontent.

Reunion of Major James P. Devereux and his son in October 1945. Devereux led the stubborn resistance to the Japanese takeover of Wake Island in December 1941. While he was interned in a Japanese prison camp, his wife passed away. (Thomas D. McAvoy/Time & Life Pictures/Getty Images)

Getting the soldiers home was one hurdle, reintegrating them into civilian life was another, and the latter caused a great deal of anxiety. David Gerber provides an intriguing analysis of the conundrum:

On the one hand, the veteran’s heroism and sacrifices are celebrated and memorialized and debts of gratitude, both symbolic and material, are paid to him. On the other hand, the veteran also inspires anxiety and fear and is seen as a threat to social order and political stability. This second, less officially acknowledged response is based on a plausible, though greatly exaggerated projection: remove young men from the restraining influence of educational institutions, employment and family; provide them with advanced weapons training and send them off on a violent adventure; expose their minds and bodies to horrific injuries; and then attempt to return them speedily to the life they had previously known, and you have a prescription for individual and social chaos.⁶

Due to improved evacuation procedures, many of the battlefield casualties in World War II received prompt treatment that saved their lives. Nearly 700,000 American servicemen were physically wounded in the war; some 300,000 of these needed long-term hospitalisation and rehabilitation. Amputation of a limb was a comparatively common injury, though losing a leg happened more frequently than losing an arm or hand. Double amputations of upper extremities (like Homer’s), were actually very rare. Army doctors counted only some sixty cases of such injuries.⁷

As historians have documented, overall the US government had learned from its disastrous handling of World War I veterans, when unemployment and homelessness culminated in 17,000 angry ex-servicemen camping out in Washington, DC in the 1932 Bonus March. This time the government’s preparations to reintegrate veterans into post-war society were much more effective. In 1944 FDR’s administration had passed the GI Bill of Rights, guaranteeing access to education and home loans. When the war ended, President Truman called Congress back from recess in September 1945 to tell lawmakers, ‘The cost of this transition from war to peace is as much a part of the cost of war as the transition from peace to war – and we should so consider it.’⁸ The government already guaranteed demobilised military men $20 a week for as long as fifty-two weeks, depending on the length of service. But most servicemen didn’t want temporary compensation; they wanted jobs. Truman soon began to push for the ‘Full Employment Act of 1945’. The legislation finally passed by Congress in 1946 was much weaker than Truman had envisioned; it withdrew the original provisions guaranteeing that the Federal government would ensure that jobs were made available.⁹ By October 1946, when Best Years was in post-production, veterans accounted for half of the country’s unemployed.¹⁰

Those jobs that ex-servicemen did land did not always suit them. As activists for veterans noted, ‘There is no particular benefit to the combat major in guaranteeing him the right to go back to the shipping clerk’s job he had before the war.’¹¹ Nor did ordinary jobs pay very well. During the war, labour unions had refrained from asking for raises or striking but, with the end of the conflict, pent-up demand for higher salaries and better working conditions exploded. The year 1946 saw an upsurge of labour unrest and strikes, some violent, frightening the country with their ferocity. Hollywood itself went through a series of labour strikes in 1945 and 1946, shattering the fiction of an harmonious relationship between management and workers. In 1946 the average salary for full-time employees was $2,360, roughly $26,000 in today’s dollars. (Fred Derry’s salary at the drugstore is below this 1946 average by about 30 per cent.)

In the US, key goods – meat, wool, rubber, sugar and gasoline – had been rationed during the war, though average citizens collaborated with organised crime to create a booming black market. In 1945 restrictions were lifted. Though soon manufacturing would shift to creating a super-abundance of commercial goods (pictured in the film’s drugstore scenes), the transitional months after the war saw some items in short supply, including automobiles and civilian suits.

However, as we know, no sooner had World War II ended than the Cold War began. Actually, Cold War ideology in the US took root much earlier, in the wave of anti-Communist panic in the 1920s, and the tensions and conflicts between the left (especially labour) and right throughout the Depression. However, during 1945 revelations of Communist spy rings in the US and Canada and leaks of classified documents became public scandals, fanning fears of Communist infiltration and subversion of American life. Moreover, relations with the Soviet Union swiftly deteriorated. In March 1946 Winston Churchill delivered his famous ‘Iron Curtain’ speech, drawing attention to the Soviet Union’s despotic partitioning of Europe. Thus, in Best Years, when Butch (Hoagy Carmichael) says to Homer, ‘Everything will settle down nicely. Unless we have another war. And then none of us have to worry because we’ll all be blown to bits the first day’, he articulates the pervasive dread in a frightening era of super-power conflict.

Note the newspaper headline

In the 1946 mid-term election, the Republican Party ran on an anti-Truman, anti-labour, anti-Communist platform, asking voters, ‘Got enough inflation? … got enough debt? … got enough strikes? … got enough communism?’ The Republicans won fifty-five seats in the House of Representatives, and twelve in the Senate, regaining control of Congress from the Democrats for the first time since 1928. These Republicans, allied with conservative Southern Democrats, steered the country rightwards. Congressman John Rankin, a Democrat from Mississippi and a notorious anti-Communist, bigot and anti-Semite – he once claimed that World War II was started by ‘a little group of our international Jewish brethren’¹² – succeeded in transforming the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which had been established in 1938 as a ‘special’ committee, into a standing (permanent) committee in 1945. That year, and gathering steam through 1946 and 1947, HUAC began investigations that would lead directly to the probe into Communist influence in Hollywood.

Personal Lives

Ernie Pyle, a war correspondent for the Scripps Howard newspaper chain, had a colloquial style that made readers feel as if he were their intimate friend. He was not a dashing, reckless adventurer, but a slight, graying man in his forties, travelling with lower-echelon troops, writing from their perspective, rather than that of the brass. Pyle won a Pulitzer Prize for his contributions in 1944, and his experiences are the basis for a quite respectable movie, The Story of G.I. Joe, directed by William Wellman, released in June 1945. Unfortunately, Pyle never attended the premiere because he was killed in action in the Pacific on 19 April 1945. The nation, just coming to grips with FDR’s death, mourned all over again.

Pyle’s collection of essays, Brave Men, was a bestseller throughout 1944 and 1945. At the end of Brave Men, Pyle cautioned his countrymen:

Thousands of our men will soon be returning to you. They have been gone a long time and they have seen and done and felt things you cannot know. They will be changed. They will have to learn how to adjust themselves to peace. Last night we had a violent electrical storm around our countryside. The storm was half over before we realized that the flashes and the crashings around us were not artillery but plain old-fashioned thunder and lightning. It will be odd to hear only thunder again. You must remember that such little things as that are in our souls, and will take time.¹³

Though many soldiers returned home in good shape and made the transition without undue hardship, others returned affected both in body and in soul. Although the term ‘post-traumatic stress disorder’ (PTSD) was not coined until the 1970s during the Vietnam War, some World War II servicemen returned experiencing classic symptoms, such as nightmares, anxiety, anger and inability to focus. Researchers associated with Veterans Affairs now estimate that as many as 30 per cent of World War II combatants ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Historical Context
• 2 Production History
• 3 Reception
• 4 Aesthetics
• 5 Thematic Connotations
• Afterword
• Notes
• Credits
• Select Bibliography
• ecopyright