The Great Movies III

One of the movie's most famous sequences involves Fred deciding to leave town in search of work, and going to the airport. While waiting for his military transport flight, he wanders into a vast graveyard of mothballed warplanes. This scene is heartbreaking. Once Fred flew these planes, and now they, and their pilots, are no longer needed. The payoff of the scene is deeply ironic.

And consider the film's extended closing scene, when Homer and Wilma get married. Fred and Peggy are among the guests. Earlier they have told each other that they are in love, and Peggy vowed to her parents she would break up Fred's mistaken and miserable marriage. But Al warned Fred away from his daughter-one reason he was leaving town, even though the tawdry Marie is filing for divorce.

Wyler shows the entire marriage ceremony, all the way through, starting with Carmichael playing the wedding march and the lovers exchanging vows. There are two parallel lines of suspense. One involves the marriage itself, and whether Homer's hooks can slip a ring on Wilma's finger. The other involves Fred and Peggy on opposite sides of the same room, their eyes locked as they hear the wedding vows being pronounced. Deep focus allows Wyler to show both of these events at once, and his framing draws our eyes to the back of the shot, where Teresa Wright, never prettier or more vulnerable, doesn't move a muscle.

The Best Years of Our Lives doesn't use verbal or technical pyrotechnics. It trusts entirely in the strength of its story. One of the sources of its power is the performance by Harold Russell, the handless veteran. Producer Samuel Goldwyn was actually criticized at the time for his "tasteless" use of Russell, but look at the heartbreaking scene where Homer invites Wilma up to his bedroom-not to make a pass, but to show her what is involved in getting ready for bed. He thinks maybe then she'll understand why he doesn't think he can marry her.

Russell was an untrained actor, but utterly sincere. He says: "This is when I know I'm helpless. My hands are down there on the bed. I can't put them on again without calling to somebody for help. I can't smoke a cigarette or read a book. If that door should blow shut, I can't open it and get out of this room. I'm as dependent as a baby that doesn't know how to get anything except to cry for it."We know Russell is speaking for himself, and the emotional power is overwhelming. O'Donnell's response is pitchperfect.

Russell won an honorary Oscar, "for bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance. "Although he was actually nominated for best supporting actor, the Academy board voted the special award because they thought he didn't have a chance of winning. They were wrong. He won the Oscar, the only time an actor has been given two Oscars for the same role. The film also won for best picture, actor (March), director, screenplay, editing, and score.

As long as we have wars and returning veterans, some of them wounded, The Best Years of Our Lives will not be dated. The movie is available on DVD, but there are no bells and whistles, and it calls out for a special edition or the Criterion treatment. I agree with Noel Megahey at DVDTalk.com: "Some other studios might regard a film that won eight Oscars as a major back-catalogue release but not MGM. The DVD presentation of the film is barely even adequate as a barebones release, with ... not a single feature to support the film's historical and cinematic importance."

Note: the film is said to have inspired one of Samuel Goldwyn's famous Goldwynisms: "I don't care if the film doesn't make a nickel. I just want every man, woman, and child in America to see it."

ventually the veterans in the rifle squad stop bothering to learn the names of the new kids who arrive to bring them up to strength. They get killed so quickly, it's not worth the trouble. But the sergeant and four of his men make it all the way through the war, or almost, anyway-from North Africa to Sicily to Omaha Beach on D-Day to Belgium and finally to Germany and the liberation of a death camp.

Is it unlikely these five would be survivors? Not to Sam Fuller, who wrote and directed The Big Red One (1980), based on his own combat memories. "I wanted to do the story of a survivor," he told me when the movie premiered at Cannes, "because all war stories are told by survivors."

Fuller was a cigar-chomping, tough-talking, wiry little guy who started out as a teenage New York crime reporter, lying about his age to get the job. He wrote pulp novels, he talked tough, he fought all the way through the war, and he carried around memories of the First Infantry Division, the Big Red One. He made a lot of other movies first, hardboiled war movies like Steel Helmet and Fixed Bayonets (both 1951), noir classics like Pickup on South Street (1953), and cult B pictures like Shock Corridor (1963) and The Naked Kiss (1964).