The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) -- William Wyler

This is a special and memorable film. Still the best of Hollywood’s Coming Home films and among the greatest American produced ensemble pieces, there is good reason why The Best Years of Our Lives won seven Academy Awards, including Best Film, Best Director, Best Actor, and Best Screenplay. Part of it was timing. Released just after the Second World War in 1946, it perfectly captured the nation’s jumbled mix of emotions: relief, angst, hopefulness, and confusion. But most of the explanation for its acclaim lies in its superb craftsmanship.

Homecoming at Butch's.

The story centers on three ordinary veterans. Recently discharged, they form a bond as they share a flight back to their Mid-western hometown, Boone City. Sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March), Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), and sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) share something else--the uncertainty all veterans face when trying to readjust back into civilized society, and the frightful question: are the best years of their lives behind them?

The men are from very different socioeconomic backgrounds, and except for the common experience of war and their fears of the future, none of these people would likely have become friends. Of course, that’s part of the beauty of the film. Circumstances have thrown them together, for better or worse. How Director William Wyler makes them interact—together and with family and friends—and what’s in store for them in a post-war world, is the heart of the story. And Wyler tells that story in a lean, honest style that surely touches every viewer, be they a veteran themselves or someone who has lost sleep praying that a family member return home safely from some overseas conflict.   

Homer has the most difficult task, having lost both hands when his ship was sunk. He now wears two hooks. “I can dial telephones, I can drive a car, I can even put nickels in the jukebox. I'm all right,” he explains, “but... well, you see, I've got a girl.” Homer doesn’t want to be a burden to Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell), the girl he planned to marry, and at first pushes her away. Feeling self-conscious, he imagines he only engenders pity. Russell, a real vet with no previous acting experience, is remarkable in a sensitive performance.

In a film loaded with great dialog, one of the best exchanges occurs shortly after the men arrive home. Fred and Al watch expectantly from a cab Homer’s uneasy reunion with Wilma and his family. They see Wilma rush to hug Homer, but he stands stiff and awkward in her embrace. Fred doesn’t notice and merely shakes his head, saying, "You gotta hand it to the Navy. They sure trained that kid how to use those hooks." Al, more observant, catches the moment and replies, "They couldn't train him to put his arms around his girl, or to stroke her hair." 

That exchange is typical of Robert Sherwood’s perfectly paced and understated screenplay. It contains no hint of melodrama, just everyday speech and emotion that puts a lump in your throat. Another lump comes when Al arrives home to surprise his family. He motions for his children to keep quiet. His wife Milly, played with grace by Myrna Loy, is in the kitchen with her back to the room, talking over her shoulder. She suddenly and instinctively knows that her husband is home. She turns abruptly, they lock eyes, and no words are necessary. The viewer knows these two are deeply in love.
 

Homer and Wilma have a moving exchange. 

One of the hallmarks of the film is its open and honest treatment of disabilities. In one particularly moving moment Homer removes his prosthetics to show Wilma how helpless he is without them. He can manage to wriggle into his pajama top, but he can’t button it.

Al is the most financially secure of the three friends. He returns to his pre-war job as a bank executive. It is a good life but everything has changed. His children have grown and he quickly finds that the nation is tired of war and wants to move on. The bank cares little that a loan applicant served his country. What matters is what kind of collateral he brings to the table.

Perhaps the character that most of the 1946 audience related to best is Fred. He is from the wrong side of the tracks and comes home to a dead-end job as a soda jerk, the same one he held before the war. With no better prospects in sight he also must deal with a philandering wife who’s not satisfied with his $32.50 weekly salary. He is miserable. Complicating matters is his growing affection for Al’s pretty daughter Peggy, played by Teresa Wright.

In World War II servicemen hung pinups of Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth in their quarters, but it was women like Wright’s Peggy that they wanted to come home to and marry and have children. She is young, beautiful, innocent, and vulnerable. Wright burst onto the Hollywood scene five years earlier with an astounding record of early success, garnering nominations for best supporting actress in each of her first three films (she won for Mrs. Miniver). Best Years was her sixth film and she is stunning.

Dana Andrews as Fred and Teresa Wright as Peggy.

The second scene at Butch's occurs later when Al asks Fred to stay away from Peggy. He likes Fred, but sees no future in it. Besides he's married and Peggy is too young to know what she's getting into. It is a father protecting his daughter. It is a tense scene with the emotions just under the surface. The conversation here is direct and painful. At one point Fred is unable to look Al in the eye and stares vacantly at the tabletop. Already relying on shaky self-esteem, he understands that Al doesn’t think he’s good enough for Peggy. Facing a hard sobering truth, Fred can’t escape the fact that his own life is a mess. Al, a decent and fine man in his own right, feels like a heel, leaving the viewer sympathizing with both characters.

Wyler and cinematographer Gregg Toland use deep focus photography to close this scene with a remarkable shot of Fred in the far background, calling Peggy from a corner phone booth to break it off. In the foreground, Al pretends to listen to Homer playing the piano with his hooks, but his attention is on Fred—just like the viewer’s. Because everyone has either made such a call or been on the receiving end of one, the scene is particularly personal, poignant, and effective. 
  

Another memorable scene has Fred planning to leave town to find other work after he has been fired from the drugstore. Without Peggy he has no reason to stay in Boone City. He walks dejectedly through an airfield as he waits for his transport. It is littered with abandoned bombers. Like their pilots, the machines are no longer needed and are ready for the scrap heap. Fred climbs into the nose bubble of a B-17 and momentarily goes into a trance, again reliving the horrors of war. Nine-time Oscar nominee Hugo Friedhofer wrote the film score, which here is appropriately dramatic.

The film ends with a marriage and the promise of another. Homer has accepted Wilma's love, and the entire cast gathers for the ceremony. Again, Director Wyler works wonders with misdirection and deep focus photography. As the wedding couple exchange vows, and Homer deftly slips the ring on Wilma's finger using his hooks, Fred and Peggy gaze at each other across the room, oblivious to what else is happening. By now Fred has a new job and is divorced. The young couple move to embrace and kiss. Knowing that they'll face a tough life ahead they profess their love for one another.  
     

The success and effectiveness of the film is more than the sum of its parts. It draws the viewer in completely, giving the sensation of watching real people instead of actors, struggling with everyday problems. The acting throughout is outstanding. March and Russell won Oscars but any of the leads could have. It is Andrews’ best performance. Number 37 on the American Film Institute’s Top 100 American Films, it belongs higher. 

Film Noir - An American Art Form

Hollywood directors unleashed a new type of film on American audiences in the 1940s, raw, realistic, and black to the core.

As American an art form as jazz, Film Noir sprung out of the national angst surrounding World War II. And like the syncopated rhythmic music developed by black and Creole musicians and first heard on the streets of New Orleans at the turn of the 20th Century, noir films blended existing artistic motifs and slapped in generous doses of improvisation and cynicism to become a new cinematic language or genre that would affect film-makers across the globe.

Its heyday was an approximate fifteen-year stretch starting in the early 1940s. The term film noir, meaning "black film," was coined by French critic Nino Frank in 1946 as applied to Hollywood movies of the period. Its roots can be found in American crime novels of the Depression era and German Expressionist cinema of the 1920s.

Though the visual style might vary, its most consistent characteristic was stark, distinctive high-contrast lighting in black-and-white photography, laden with deep shadows and menace. Its citizens were mostly low-rungers: desperate small-time hoods, beat cops, waitresses, lonely saps and loners, and most famously, femme fatales, gals out to move up a rung or two, anyway they could. Along the way the audience is sure to get a good hard look at society's underbelly.

Sunglasses can't disguise Barbara Stanwyk's duplicitous Phyllis Dietrichson.

In Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity (1944), smitten agent Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), finds himself in over his head when he joins Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) in a plot to kill her neglecting husband to defraud the insurance agency. Stanwyck embodied the cool, calculating femme fatale role as well as any actress. Based on James Cain's hard-boiled crime novel, it ends badly for both of them. Neff never had a chance, saying at the end, "I killed him for money--and a woman--and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the girl. Pretty isn't it?"

Noir icon and champion chump, Robert Mitchum, falls in love with the wrong woman in Jacques Tourneur's Out of the Past (1947), a tale of a detective unable to escape a past mistake. He has a choice, but he can't help turning his back on the good, sensible girl who loves him. Featuring Jane Greer as the twisted object of his affections, and Kirk Douglas as his gangster nemesis, the film contains characteristic voice-over dialog. Some of the best reveals the depths of Mitchum's obsession. "I went to Pablo's that night. I knew I'd go there every night until she showed up. I knew she knew it. I sat there and I drank bourbon and I shut my eyes, but I didn't think of a joint on 56th Street. I knew where I was and what I was doing. What a sucker I was."

Mitchum had bad luck with cars in noirs. When Greer's character realizes he is driving them toward a police barricade, she shoots him dead before police machine gunfire shatters the windshield. Six years later, in director Otto Preminger's Angel Face, dreamy but dangerous Jean Simmons backs him up over a cliff.

Mitchum wasn't the only sap to fall victim to an enticing beauty. Edward G. Robinson starred in two films by German-born director Fritz Lang: The Woman in the Window (1944) and Scarlett Street (1945). In each he is mild-mannered, middle-aged, and a little dumpy. If it occurs to him that it is odd that the beautiful Joan Bennett seems attracted to him, he pushes it out of his mind--he is infatuated. Both films have the relationship leading to run-ins with Dan Duryea and murder. Duryea, a fixture in many noirs, had a sniveling demeanor and could curl his lip in a sneer with the best of them.

Edward G. Robinson can't resist the beautiful Joan Bennett.

The quintessential heist movie is The Asphalt Jungle (1950). Directed by John Houston and set in Cincinnati, it features a band of small-time crooks, more pathetic than sinister. These are just guys looking for a break in life: Doc Reidenschneider (Sam Jaffe), the recently paroled mastermind hoping for one last big score; Dix Handley (Sterling Hayden), the muscle with a dream of owning a horse farm; Louie Ciavelli (Anthony Caruso), the safe cracker whose wife and kids live in a cramped tenement; and Gus (James Whitmore), the getaway car driver who owns a greasy-spoon.

Noir crime doesn't pay and you can often expect a double-cross. The band comes up against one when, after securing the gems, their fence, dishonest attorney Alonzo Emmerich (Louis Calhern), fails to deliver the payout as promised. Shots are fired and the band disperses to their respective fates: arrest, suicide, and death.

The Asphalt Jungle inspired numerous copy-cats, and to demonstrate its influence overseas, director Jules Dassin produced the similarly constructed Rififi, a stylish 1955 French thriller.    

Comely Marilyn Monroe was introduced to America in The Asphalt Jungle.

    
Director Henry Hathaway pushed the violence envelope to a sick level to show that something stank in post-war American society. If we had defeated Hitler and Tojo in Europe and Asia, we had still failed to eradicate corruption, poverty, and malaise in our own cities. In Kiss of Death (1947) Richard Widmark burst onto screens as Tommy Udo, one of Noir's most demented characters. In one memorable scene, he laughs maniacally as he lashes a woman to her wheelchair and sends her bouncing down a flight of stairs, first taunting her, "You know what I do to squealers? I let 'em have it in the belly, so they can roll around for a long time thinkin' it over. You're worse than him, tellin' me he's comin' back. Ya lyin' old hag!"

Tommy Udo helps a lady down the stairs.

Udo wasn't the only psychopath loitering in movie houses that year. Robert Wise's Born to Kill showed that depravity wasn't restricted to the low and middle class. It featured Lawrence Tierney as the appropriately named Sam Wild, a man without a conscious or morals, and whose liaison with a wealthy socialite out to grab her sister's money is no bargain for either. Claire Trevor played the woman, who one character describes as "the coldest iceberg of a woman I ever saw, and the rottenest inside. I've seen plenty, too. I wouldn't trade places with you if they sliced me into little pieces."

Lawrence Tierney and Claire Trevor form an unholy alliance in Born to Kill.

Ten years later we had made little progress in fixing our problems. They might be covered in a veneer of shiny new refrigerators, green suburbs, cars with power-steering (Chrysler's Hydraguide), and that most sought-after creature comfort, television; but they were alive and well.

No film shined a light under the veneer with better acuity and sharpness than Sweet Smell of Success (1958) by Alexander Mackendrick. The story plays out in the tony clubs and restaurants of Broadway and Times Square, and on the dark, crowded, and wet streets of New York. It's a wonderfully shot film by famed cameraman James Wong Howe in gritty black and white, helped immensely by Elmer Bernstein's tense jazz score--you can almost smell the cigarette smoke and garbage cans, and feel hot sweat running down people's backs in the jostling street venders and crowds. It is a fascinating look at how the media can peddle scandal and insinuation to titillate readers. You can't help but peek.

"Match me, Sidney."

Tony Curtis and Burt Lancaster star, Curtis as Sidney Falco, a lapdog press agent who "wants to get way up high, where it's always balmy;" and Lancaster as powerful columnist J. J. Hunsecker. Their relationship, rotten and symbiotic, is the heart of the film.

Happiness is an elusive dream in Film Noir. The genre attracted some of the best Hollywood directors and actors. Film-maker Nicholas Ray fashioned a tense drama from Dorothy Hughes' pulp novel, In a Lonely Place (1950), where the dark soul of a man in on view in all its ugliness. The requisite atmospheric lighting and shadows are here, along with melodramatic music and as flawed a protagonist as ever trod the genre. Dixon Steele (Humphrey Bogart) is a paranoid writer, beset by inner demons and a wild temper. When falsely accused of murder and hounded by the police, he slowly unravels and cracks under the pressure until he risks losing the woman he loves. He sees it happening and that makes his inability to control his emotions and behavior that much more affecting. 

"I was born when she kissed me.  I died when she left me.  I lived a few weeks when she loved me."

Like most noirs, you know it won't end happily. The final scene is gripping as Steele confronts Laura Grey (Gloria Grahame) in her apartment, believing she has betrayed him. He finally goes too far and Bogart sags a broken man. You can't help but feel sorry for him. He came so close.

Noir characters often face moral conflicts. In Otto Preminger's Where the Sidewalk Ends (1950) police Mark Dixon (Dana Andrews) lets his penchant for excessive use-of-force box him in a corner. His victim, a low-life hood, doesn't matter, but Dixon's plan to cover up a likely manslaughter charge goes awry when his actions put an innocent man under suspicion. That he happens to be the father of the girl Dixon has fallen in love with makes matters even more difficult. Does he confess the crime, face expulsion from the police force and jail time, or keep quiet and win the girl of his dreams? The dilemma leaves the officer at a loss. His lament, "Where the devil am I? I keep coming and going," mirrored the state of confusion America sometime found itself in in dealing with societal woes in the post-war era.

Preminger had earlier cast Andrews as a policeman in Laura (1944), one of the genre's most celebrated efforts. Here, while investigating the killing of Laura (Gene Tierney), Andrews falls in love with the girl's memory, helped along by her striking painting. In a surprise twist, Laura turns up alive. It is an innocent friend who was murdered by mistake.

Dana Andrews has a strange attraction to a portrait of a dead girl.

Noir films petered out at the end of the 1950s as film-makers and American audiences grew tired of the genre. Westerns had taken over on TV, and technicolor epics were the new darlings of cinema. One of the last noirs was one of the best, Orson Welles' sordid Touch of Evil (1958), which depicted corruption in a Texas border town.

Welles played Hank Quinlan, a corpulent policeman not above planting evidence to secure a conviction. "I've never framed anyone," he says, "...unless they're guilty."

Welles infused his film with his signature camera magic: Extended takes, jarring angles, and uncomfortable close-ups. Like the genre itself, Quinlan comes to an abrupt end, floating in a pool of fetid water. It is a fine and fitting death.

In Touch of Evil Uncle Joe Grande is no match for Hank Quinlan.