The Best Years of Our Lives
On November 21, 1946, William Wyler's "The Best Years of Our Lives" premiered in New York.
Frances Howard, the wife of producer Samuel Goldwyn, can be called the initiator of the film. It was she who drew her husband's attention to a photograph in the August 7, 1944 issue of Time magazine. It showed a group of Marines returning home from the fronts of World War II, leaning out of a car on which someone had written "Home Again!" in chalk. The note illustrated by this photograph described the challenges veterans would face as they returned to their families and the jobs they did before the war. Samuel Goldwyn shared his impressions of the article with his acquaintance McKinley Kantor, who during the war was a war correspondent.
Kantor was also impressed by the note, and he wrote a whole poem (in blank verse) "Glory for Me". Samuel Goldwyn approached writer Robert E. Sherwood to turn McKinley Kantor's verse novel into a film screenplay. Sherwood, by then a three-time Pulitzer Prize winner who during the war served as director of the foreign office of the Office of War Information, accepted Goldwyn's offer with enthusiasm.
The direction of the future film was entrusted to William Wyler, and this was not done at all by chance, since during the World War II Wyler spent 3 years in Europe, participating in hostilities as a front-line operator with the rank of major in the US Air Force. (Wyler almost completely lost his hearing when an anti-aircraft shell exploded near his plane. So he filmed sitting under the camera with large headphones connected to an amplifier so he could hear the actors.)
The idea of making a film about veterans adjusting to civilian life after World War II puzzled many producers, as there was a widespread notion in the US film community that war-weary audiences were more interested in entertaining films. Many convinced Goldwyn that his film would fail at the box office. But Samuel Goldwyn, born Shmuel Gelbfisch, a descendant of Jews who emigrated from Poland, one of the hardest hit countries during the war, replied: “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.”
Filming began in April 1946, 7 months after the end of World War II. William Wyler, as an experienced documentary filmmaker, strove to ensure the maximum authenticity in everything. To this end, real war veterans were invited to participate in the film, the actors were filmed in their own clothes, authentic props were used. And even for the role of an injured veteran, William Wyler found a real disabled person - Harold Russell, who lost both hands during the war and used prosthetic hooks. Wyler even had a major scandal with Goldwyn when he found out that Goldwyn had sent Harold Russell for acting lessons: Wyler preferred Russell's unprepared, natural acting.
When the film was ready, Samuel Goldwyn was initially afraid that its 172-minute runtime, almost twice the usual length of a motion picture at the time, would put off audiences. He rewatched the film several times to find pieces that could be cut without damaging the film. But he could not find even a minute fragment. As it turned out, Goldwyn's fears were in vain: the financial success of the picture was more than impressive: box office receipts more than 11 times exceeded the cost of its production.
No less grandiose were the festival successes of Wyler's film masterpiece. In early 1947, the film won two Golden Globe Awards, one for Best Picture. The second was awarded to Harold Russell as Best Non-Professional Actor. Then the film received 8 nominations for the Academy Award, of which it won 7, including in the most important categories: Best Picture and Best Director. Moreover, in both of these categories, Wyler and his paintings competed with Frank Capra and his film "It's a Wonderful Life". And Harold Russell received as many as two gilded figurines. One - for winning the Best Supporting Actor nomination. And the second - without any nominations, with the wording "For bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in The Best Years of Our Lives." One of these statuettes 46 years later he sold for 60.5 thousand dollars. The money was needed for the treatment of his wife.
William Wyler's film "The Best Years of Our Lives" was a major festival success not only in the US but also in Europe. In 1948, Danish film critics awarded the film their Bodil Film Award as Best American Film, and William Wyler was awarded the Best Director Award at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival. In 1949, the British Film Academics awarded Wyler's BAFTA Award for Best Film from any Source 1947.
Reviews from professional film critics were overwhelmingly enthusiastic. Bosley Crowther filled his review, published in The New York Times the day after the premiere, with exclusively laudatory epithets, dispensed with his traditional "hairpins" to the film and formulated a general conclusion:
""The Best Years of Our Lives" catches the drama of veterans returning home from war as no film—or play or novel that we've yet heard of—has managed to do."
American film critic guru Roger Ebert, in his 2007 review, rated the film a maximum of 4 stars, included it in his "Great Movies" list, and wrote that
"Seen more than six decades later, it feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided. After the war years of patriotism and heroism in the movies, this was a sobering look at the problems veterans faced when they returned home. ... The film makes no effort to paint these men as extraordinary. Their lives, their characters, their prospects are all more or less average, and Wyler doesn't pump in superfluous drama. That's why the movie is so effective, and maybe why it doesn't seem as dated as some 1946 dramas."
The film was not shown in the USSR.
Modern moviegoers appreciate the film no less highly than the audience of the second half of the 40s of the last century. 68% of IMDB and Kinopoisk users rated the film from 8 to 10, and 21% of users gave the film the highest score of 10. Taking into account this indicator and the above, the rating of William Wyler's film "The Best Years of Our Lives", according to FilmGourmand version, was 9.671. In the Golden Thousand, the film takes 69th Rank.
