Greatest Film From & For The Greatest Generation

Rating: 10/10 (2 July 2008)

William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives is deserved in the category of great films. It has an excellent cast headed by Frederick March & Myrna Loy. It has excellent direction & production. It uses more drama than action though it has just enough action to enhance the drama. This is a movie which you get more out of each time you watch it. How Wyler frames this story is classic.
What really makes the film great is a story that pulls in a viewer because of it's subject. The story is how did the returning vets of World War 2 deal with their war experiences, & how did it effect them. It runs multiple story lines through more of an ensemble cast than was prevalent in other films of its time. It does everything right.
Later on the closest the Vietnam generation has to this is the film COMING HOME - but this Wyler film is done much better. You really feel like you know the characters in this film. This film deals with how people from several walks of life were dealing with the after war experience.
Among the excellent story lines is one vet dealing with the loss of his arms in the war and trying to adjust. There is an officer dealing with having to struggle as employers do not count his war experiences as a marketable job skill for peace time. There is a loan officer at a bank and how he is touched by both of these folks & other returning vets.
There is the scene which seems remote now, but is still haunting, of a vet walking through the grave yard of military planes built for the war parked on a seemingly endless field, being haunted by the images of the equipment and his own war experiences flooding back into his head as he looks at it. In addition to Wyler's Chariot race in 1959's BEN HUR, this scene is to me just as powerful & memorable in this film for a whole set of other reasons.
If every film were made as well as this one was, I could never leave the theater.