The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler) (Patreon)

74/100

Second viewing, last seen ca. 1990-91 (during my first pass through the canon while working at a video store). Like Mrs. Miniver, it's remarkably frank and unsentimental in many of its particulars, but averse to making anyone too uncomfortable—the ideal Oscar juggernaut. Its emblematic figure, perhaps, is Al's son Rob, who brings up Hiroshima toward the beginning, suggesting a generational chasm in how the war is perceived, but disappears from the movie shortly thereafter, never to be seen (and barely even to be referred to) again. Harold Russell's function here, in particular, is fascinatingly multivalent: Wyler devotes a lot of screen time to Homer's self-sufficiency, observing him briskly and efficiently perform various complicated tasks with his hooks, forestalling our pity...but later allows him to lash out with anger at a curious little girl, and to show Wilma (in a scene of bracing non-sexual intimacy) how utterly helpless he feels once the harness is off. All of that's gratifyingly complex, but the film also employs Homer as an all-purpose conscience-tugger, with e.g. Al suddenly agreeing to approve a vet's unsecured loan after Homer stops by the bank. (I'm more inclined to be indulgent about Fred and Peggy finally clinching at Homer and Wilma's wedding, if only because of the way that Wyler stages it, with the entire room crowding into the right half of the frame to leave Fred in the far-left foreground and Peggy in the far-left background. I've said it before: He's an underrated visual stylist.) It's perhaps unfair for me to wonder what a masterpiece this might have been had somebody like Preminger tackled it; when a film is 90% stringent and incisive, though, the facile stuff stings more.

Oddly enough, Best Years' most potent storyline bears only a tangential relationship (at best) to the trials of post-war readjustment. I gushed a bit on Twitter about Teresa Wright, whose performance is a marvel of emotional directness tempered by conscientious reserve; the triangle's other two legs are a bit less sturdy—Mayo's encouraged to be detestable, always a shallow means of aligning our sympathies—but I still emitted a chortle of delighted surprise when semi-professional good girl Peggy announces her intention of breaking up the marriage, and got properly chilled by Al and Fred's frosty showdown (which thankfully doesn't get patched up just because Homer arrives). Again, though, none of this superb married-man melodrama is remotely returning-vet-specific, which on the one hand helps prevent the film from seeming programmatic but on the other hand makes one feel as it could have and perhaps should have constituted its own separate movie. (Rob being forgotten once this subplot emerges only reinforces the latter. What had briefly looked like a tough-minded exploration of Al the former patriarch coming to terms with his "demotion" within the family gets reduced to alcoholism + paternal protectiveness. Though Milly tallying Al's drink consumption via fork marks on the tablecloth is a memorably bleak image.) Wyler never entirely loses sight of his theme—Fred's demoralized stroll through an endless sea of decommissioned aircraft (doubly astonishing today, when any such scene would be largely computer-generated; the historical reality is awe-inspiring) makes for one helluva reminder—and there's generally so much to treasure that I can live with hackneyed moments like Al staggering drunk into Butch's two seconds after Fred says "We'll never see him again." Also, Hoagy Carmichael never gets mentioned in listicles or Twitter prompts about the best actors among musicians (Bowie, Sinatra, Cher, Waits, etc.), but I have yet to see a movie that his genial presence doesn't markedly improve.