Life after wartime

Rating: 7/10 (12 February 2018)

A really interesting and remarkable film, all the more so for being made in almost the immediate aftermath of the Allied victory of the Second World War when you'd expect Hollywood to produce celebratory even triumphal movies. Instead the viewer is presented with the intertwining stories of three battle-scarred veterans, ex-banker Fredric March, who tries to blot out his memories of the war from a bottle, shop assistant Dana Andrews, sufferer from PTSD, who low-status civvy-street return to the same lowly, indeed lower status job doesn't satisfy the ambitions of his floozy wife Virginia Mayo and young Harold Russell, a real-life vet and first time actor whose hands got blown off in a bomb explosion. Complications arise in particular when Andrews reciprocates March's daughter's attraction to him.
The film trails its future intentions in its opening scene when Andrews returning pilot is unable to pay the fare of a regular flight back home, his place on the plane taken by the next in line, a rich middle aged businessman who can afford the cost of extra luggage which he gets carried around for him a black attendant.
The way that nations treat their returning fighting forces still makes the news today, but back then was seen to be particularly patronising, unsympathetic and miserly. All three men struggle to adjust to everyday life and come up variously against snobbery, condescension and ignorance, but with all of them too, their wartime experiences have scarred them crippling them emotionally and making it hard for them to fit back into society after five years away.
For me however, I just could have done without the romance that springs up between Andrews and Wright, which, sensitively written and played as it was, seemed to belong to a different, melodramatic if still modern movie with its outlook on divorce. Similarly, the happy ending that all three men get seemed a little too much to be playing to the gallery, because I'm pretty sure that it wasn't the case for many a returning vet at the time.
The acting by all is sensitively and intuitively played, not forgetting the fine work by the women too, Mayo, Wright, Myrna Loy as March's worldly-wise wife and Cathy O'Donnell as Russell's loyal fiancée while director Wyler, ably assisted by master cameraman Gregg Toland is a masterclass in understatement. It would have been easy for Wyler to milk certain scenes and lapse into sentimentality but he never does so.
A box office smash on release and much garlanded with Oscars, it's an excellent, engrossing and perceptive study of how the war affected the lives of both active participants and their families back home.