Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation (Preview)
by Alison Macor. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, 2022. Hardcover: 195 pp., illus. $45.00.

Reviewed by Thomas Doherty

“The picture started and three minutes later I was dissolved in tears, and I cried for two hours plus,” recalled a flummoxed Billy Wilder. “And I’m not a pushover, believe me. I laugh at Hamlet.”

The picture was William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) and Wilder—who seldom bothered to correct producers who confused him with his more reliably bankable colleague—was understandably confused. The emotional gut punch hit so hard that filmgoers raised on the sappy sentimentality of Hollywood’s standard-issue three-hankie fare were unprepared for the impact. The open-ended title gave little guidance: it might be read as wistfully nostalgic, bitterly ironic, or hopefully forward-looking, but it might also imply that for all the terror, pain, and loss felt in the last four years, existence would never again be so intense, the work so important, and life so precious.

Alison Macor gives the certified masterpiece from studio-system Hollywood, the industry art firing at the peak of its powers in 1946, right before TV, HUAC, and the DOJ busted up the racket, the treatment it deserves—intelligent, sensitive, and respectful. A former film critic for The Austin Chronicle and holder of a PhD in Radio-Television-Film from the University of Texas, she has managed to emerge from graduate school with her good sense, fangirl enthusiasm, and lucid prose intact. Macor moves through the postwar cultural context, the production history, the film, the ecstatic critical and popular reception (nine Oscars, lines around the block), and the aftermath just a year later when, Wyler lamented, the stifling atmosphere of the Hollywood Blacklist would have strangled the project in its crib. Tracking Best Years from a notion inspired by a two-page Time magazine article on veteran readjustment to heavy rotation on TCM, she smoothly incorporates and generously acknowledges the research and insights of previous critics, culls the money-minded trade press with ready expertise, and applies her own sharp eye for illuminating intrepretations. Her study is a welcome addition to a growing body of single-film biographies, works such as Glenn Frankel’s High Noon: The Hollywood Blacklist and the Making of an American Classic (2017); Michael Benson’s Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece (2018); and Sam Wasson’s The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood (2020), all of which chronicle the creation of—and tell cool inside stories about—a landmark film whose backstory spirals out into broader cultural history.

The plot of Best Years is the scaffolding less for a melodrama than a mood. A trio of returning war veterans bonds while hopping a B-17 back to their hometown, the fictional Rockwellian burg of Boone City, somewhere in the heartland (think Cincinnati): sailor and bilateral amputee Homer Parrish (Harold Russell); bombardier Capt. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews); and grizzled noncom Al Stephenson (Fredric March). From the Plexiglas® nose cone of the bomber, they look down at oblivious civilians playing golf, as if, gasps Homer, nothing had ever happened. Driving through the old hometown in a taxicab, the men watch wide-eyed as the world they left behind—or rather a world now transformed—passes by in a montage of peace and plenty, sheer munificence actually, with all the things so lately rationed or out of reach there now for the taking—automobiles, steaks, teenagers in hot rods, wives with baby carriages. This is what they have been fighting for, but it is also something they have never known. No wonder the vets are, as Fred says, repeating a resonant catchphrase from the time, “nervous out of the service.”

The film is inseparable from its immediate postwar moment, a zeitgeist it hit dead center. Every scene assumes an intimacy with its war-tempered audience, who knew the signs and meanings of the symbols, the gestures, the feelings spoken and unspoken. Since 1941, moviegoers and Hollywood had grown up together. Neither was any longer secure under the canopy of the Production Code universe, even in a film that ends in two weddings. Homer’s metal hooks will not turn into hands in the end reel and, as Al says, he will never again caress his girl’s hair…

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Thomas Doherty, professor of American studies at Brandeis University, is author of numerous books, most recently Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century.

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Cineaste, Vol. XLVIII, No. 2