William Wyler’s drama about three servicemen coming home to one small town is long, patient and as good as anything Hollywood made about the war it had just fought. The wife written as a villain is its one cheap note.
Three men share a cab from the airfield into Boone City, and each of them, with his own front door in sight, would rather go to Butch’s bar first. Robert E. Sherwood’s screenplay, from MacKinlay Kantor’s novel, gets the whole film into that ride. Home is a street away and they would like another twenty minutes. William Wyler made The Best Years of Our Lives for Samuel Goldwyn the year after the war ended, and it is still the American film we would reach for about what happens after the parade.
We would send a stranger to see it. What decided us was Homer’s homecoming, and not for the reason we expected. Harold Russell had lost both his hands and was not an actor, and his stiffness is the performance: a sailor who has learned his hooks and now has to learn the people. But it was Minna Gombell, as his mother, who got to us. She sees the hooks for the first time on her own front step, makes one sound, and Wyler does not cut away. Cathy O’Donnell’s Wilma runs across the lawn from next door and Homer does not know where to put his arms.
Al Stephenson’s return is done in one shot. Fredric March comes through the door of the flat, hushes his children, and Gregg Toland holds the hallway in deep focus so that Myrna Loy’s Milly, at the far end, appears in the kitchen doorway and stops. Loy has the least showy part in the film and we think she is the best thing in it; the morning after, watching her husband nurse a hangover and a fixed grin, she plays a woman deciding how much to mention. March plays Al’s drinking as a habit picked up abroad, quicker than having an opinion. Back at the bank, Ray Collins’s Mr. Milton puts him in charge of small loans and reminds him, gently, that the bank is not a charity.
Toland’s deep focus is the reason critics still write about this film. The famous shot in Butch’s bar puts Hoagy Carmichael and Homer at a piano in the foreground while, in a phone booth at the far end of the bar, another man makes a call we will not describe. Everything is sharp, so you choose where to look, and you will look at the booth. Daniel Mandell cuts as little as he can and lets scenes run until somebody leaves the frame. Irene Sharaff dresses Teresa Wright’s Peggy in plain skirts and Virginia Mayo’s Marie in sequins, which tells you what the script thinks of both before either has spoken. Hugo Friedhofer’s score has a homecoming theme it uses sparingly and otherwise stays out of the bar, where Carmichael’s piano does the work.
Dana Andrews’s Fred is the hardest part and the least sentimental. He was good at one thing, at altitude, and the drugstore that employed him before the war will have him back behind the perfume counter. Andrews plays him with his jaw set and his eyes elsewhere. The nightmare Peggy hears through a bedroom door on his first night home is the film’s first admission that these men brought something back with them, and it is played without a flashback: a man shouting, and a young woman sitting on the edge of the bed until he stops.
The flaws are real. Marie is written in one colour, a wife who wants the uniform and the nightlife and nothing else, and Mayo is left with nowhere to take her. A customer at the drugstore turns up to tell Homer the war was fought for the wrong reasons, and for a minute the film is making a speech. At 171 minutes it could lose a reel and nobody would miss it. One reviewer at the time thought the whole thing heavy. We did not, but we understood the complaint by the third hour.
Late on there is a scene in a field of scrapped bombers and a scene in Homer’s bedroom, and we will say nothing about either except that we have not forgotten them. Wyler had made Mrs. Miniver in the middle of the war, to a purpose. This one was made afterwards, with nobody left to reassure, and it is the better film for it.
It is a U certificate. Watch it with someone older than you, and let them tell you afterwards which of the three they knew.
