A Film Canon

The greatest film to emerge from WWII, The Best Years Of Our Lives follows three ex- servicemen - Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a pilot, Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), a sailor, and Al Stephenson (Fredric March), a soldier - as they attempt to re-integrate themselves into their Midwestern home town. Not since Dodsworth have Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland so beautifully evoked characters gazing into their own receding past - from the magnificent opening sequence, in which the three men share the cockpit of a low-flying plane, to the penultimate one, in which Fred wanders through the local, deserted airfield, only to climb into a cockpit that has become so decontextualised as to feel like a mere projection of his haunted memory. This, in turn, contributes to a poignant confusion of generational roles, culminating with the moment at which Homer - and Harold Russell - remove their prosthetic arms: "This is when I know I'm helpless. My hands are down there on the bed...I'm as dependent as a baby that doesn't know how to get anything except cry for it." It also informs a miscommunication so subtle, so pervasive, as to be more a matter of mood than of any particular moment, coalescing around the post-war, big-business tendency to co-opt militaristic democratic rhetoric, while completely neglecting the veterans that gave rise to it, as evinced in Al's manager's simultaneous willingness to give him his old job, and unwillingness to extend loans to veterans without collateral. As with It's A Wonderful Life, this (admittedly more nuanced) cold-heartedness is associated with an urban sensibility, necessitating the radically new topography of suburbia, albeit in a sublime, rather than neighbourly, register, as if the war were ultimately fought for the right to a block of land, and radiant white goods. Hence Al's gravitation towards the 'junk business' - transforming old aeroplanes into prefabricated houses - as well as the extraordinary poignance of the final, suburban wedding, in which the conjunction of ring and prosthesis provides a fitting finale to the film's surreal, melancholy elegy for waking life, or even life itself: "I had a dream. I dreamt I was home. I've had that same dream hundreds of times before. This time I wanted to know if it's really true. Am I really home?"