A great movie which has not taken a wrinkle 70 years later

Rating: 10/10 (26 June 2014)

This subject has been treated in many ways and many times. But I think Wyler has probably approached it in the best way; not only does he study the situation from the families points of views which have been separated for 4 or 5 years but he takes also a sharp view on the attitude of the ordinary people in a town towards the soldier coming back from faraway places and where they were confronted to life and death every day.
The USA were lucky enough not to have faced the destruction such as London, or France or other European countries including Germany and Japan. Pearl Harbor although so tragic that it was is nothing compared to what happened on the other side of the Atlantic. It made the rehabilitation of the soldiers much more difficult because in their homeland the people could not really appreciate what they had been through, what they saw. All was a little bit theoretical for the US citizen at home.
The scene in the movie when Fred looses his job after his fight with the customer is exemplary of this misunderstanding of the citizen who was nicely at home while the soldier had to face the real war with all its horrors and fears and dangers. A huge psychological gap had been established between two generations if not more. This was probably not so acute in Europe because we were in the middle of the conflict, with everyday alerts etc. The soldiers' families knew what bombardments meant, the fear of being arrested for no reason by the Nazis etc. The real problem was for those who had been interned in concentration camps and who probably for a majority never really found a normal life again after what they had witnessed and suffered.
An other aspect is slightly approached by Wyler. The fact that after the war, after having seen on newsreels the horrors discovered in Germany perpetrated by the Nazis, there were still in the US, many people who pretended the country should not have gone to war and continued to have an isolationist position on the matter.
In fact what Wyler shows very well is that the US soldier coming home, was arriving like a stranger in a foreign country. And if he had been wounded seriously like Homer he had also to face the reaction and ability of his family and friends to cope with his handicap which made it more difficult to adjust to his new life as a civilian.
The movie is so well directed and the script so perfect that nearly 70 years later it has not aged a bit. Few war films can pretend to realize this.