#37 - The Best Years of Our Lives

I'd like a war movie, hold the war scenes. 1946's big hit was "The Best Years of Our Lives," mostly because it was about what an awful lot of Americans were experiencing at that time. The troops were coming home from "over there," so what other movie could be as successful as one about troops coming home?

The idea is simple: the intertwining stories of three men who return back home to the same city. They had never met before boarding the plane back home, but that chance meetings changed each of their lives forever.

While the individual stories are not all that captivating (one guy ends up with another guy's daughter), the movie is so memorable because of some of the moving moments it depicts. Most notable is a scene in which Homer, a young man who lost his hands and now has two metal hooks attached at the elbows, shows his high school sweetheart the magnitude of his injuries to see if she is ready for the commitment that would be involved in marrying him.

(As I was looking up stuff about this movie, I ran across one of the most interesting stories I've read in a while. The man who played Homer Parrish was Harold Russell, a man who actually fought and lost his hands in World War II. The director of the film saw him in a war documentary and knew he couldn't make a war movie about veterans without him. The role won him two Academy Awards for the same role--this is interesting both because his is the only case in which two Academy Awards have been given for the same role and because he is one of only two non-professional actors to win an Academy Award for acting.)

Anyway, back to the movie. The mood is so joyful and so contagious, it's hard not to like this movie. While the homecomings are met with happiness, they are undercut by a sense of disillusionment on the veterans' parts. Can they really go home again? So much had changed in the 3-4 years they were gone, has too much changed? This movie goes a long way in answering these questions and presents one of the finest examples of a war veteran movie I can think of.