The Greatest Picture Ever Made: The Best Years of Our Lives
By Nicholas Stix
May 22, 2011 (Revised for this presentation)
One of the greatest lead performances by an actor ever (Fredric March)? Check.
What was then greatest performance by a supporting actor ever (Dana Andrews)? Check.
Great supporting work by a brilliant ensemble cast (Myrna Loy, Harold Russell, Teresa Wright, et al.)? Check.
Cinematography by the greatest cameraman of his generation, who gave the world deep-focus photography, which played a pivotal role (Gregg Toland)? Check.
A screen adaptation of a powerful, 268-page poem, Glory for Me, by one of the America’s greatest writers (MacKinlay Kantor), adapted by another of America’s greatest writers, (Robert E. Sherwood)? Check.
One of the greatest original scores ever composed for a picture (Hugo Friedhofer)? Check.
Great dialogue, including one of the greatest speeches ever written for a movie? Check.
If I sound like a DVD salesman, I am, but I’m not working for a commission. If America hadn’t been infected by the toxin of racial socialism, there’d be no need for me to promote BYOL, because every school child in American would already have seen it in elementary school.
But you don’t even have to order BYOL, though I recommend that you buy both the DVD of the picture, and the CD of its score, both of which we purchased a few years ago for the Stix Family library. Turner Classic Movies is presenting the picture tonight, at 10:15 p.m., as part of its Memorial Day Marathon—34 pictures, spanning 72 hours.
Some movies seem like masterpieces the first time you see them—Woody Allen’s Zelig hit me that way—but their impact fades with repeated viewings. Others, however, become more powerful with time. That’s the way it is with masterpieces. True Grit has had that effect on me over the years, since seeing it during its first run.
I knew that BYOL was a masterpiece the first time I saw it, in an Upper West Side Manhattan revival house (which I’m sure is long gone). The last surviving cast member, Teresa Wright, spoke to the audience. (I can’t, for the life of me, recall the year; must’ve been the mid-to-late 1980s.)
Since then, I’ve seen it three or four more times, to where I can say the lines ahead of the players. And I’m not the only one in this house that can do that.
And so, BYOL has climbed the charts of my top movies. First, Kane ruled the roost alone. Then, it was Kane, the Godfather, and The Godfather, Part II. And now, it’s the Big Four. However, I give BYOL a slight edge, due to its emotional power. I suppose, from a rigorous arithmetical standpoint, BYOL should reign alone at number one, with the other three pictures tied for number two, but I’m not ready to do that. Thus, here is my current Top Ten:
1. (Tied) The Best Years of Our Lives
1. Citizen Kane
1. The Godfather
1. The Godfather, Part II
5. It’s a Wonderful Life
6. Shane
7. It Happened One Night
8. On the Waterfront
9. (Tied) The Bridge on the River Kwai
9. (Tied) Lawrence of Arabia
Main Title to BYOL’s Score, by Hugo Friedhofer
The Greatest Picture Ever Made: The Best Years of Our Lives
By Nicholas Stix
May 22, 2011 (Revised)
If a more powerful picture than The Best Years of Our Lives has ever been made that doesn’t have The Godfather or Kane in its name, I haven’t seen it.
The idea for the picture came from producer Samuel Goldwyn’s wife, Frances, who had read an article in 1944 about the problems some veterans were having, returning to civilian life in the Midwest. Goldwyn commissioned Iowan Mac Kinlay Kantor (here and here), who had served in the Army Air Force to write a script, and Kantor duly headed to a cabin in the country with a few cases of scotch, only to return a few weeks later with a … poem!? It was published in 1945 with the subtitle “A Novel” on the cover, but it’s a 268-page, narrative poem entitled Glory for Me that opens,
Fred Derry, twenty-one, and killer of a hundred men….And a powerful poem it is, but Sam Goldwyn was not amused. He had to hire a second screenwriter, the legendary Robert E. Sherwood, winner of four Pulitzer Prizes, to translate and shape Kantor’s poem into screen prose. Sherwood worked his magic, but Kantor must share the credit, if not the Oscar. The picture won eight Oscars in all, and deserved every one of them.
Because Goldwyn had engaged Freddie March to star, the focus of the story was shifted away from Fred to Al, while Homer’s affliction was changed from spasticity to having had his hands burned off in a battle. (And a good thing, too. Homer’s spasticity in the poem is just too heartbreaking to take.) And yet, running at two hours and 50 minutes, each character has enough screen time to merit Best Actor consideration.
“The Homecoming”
March imbues banker Al Stephenson with his signature mix of tragedy and comedy. Nobody played a comical drunk better than March, and Al Stephenson is a drunk. A functioning, jovial drunk, but a drunk, nonetheless. He loves his family, but hates his boss at the bank, Mr. Milton (Ray Collins), “the old hypocrite.”
I don’t know of any harder scripting task than writing a good speech. Can’t be too short or too long. Can’t be too melodramatic. Sherwood gives March’s drunken Al Stephenson an oft-times hilarious speech as the guest of honor at a dinner held by his boss, to celebrate his return and promotion, in which Al goes from the heights of his career to almost talking himself out of a job. It’s a real tightrope act, but March pulls it off, with subtle assistance from Loy.
Clip of the Speech
March uses some stage business as subtle punctuation to the misery Al feels in his work life. Anytime he deals with Mr. Milton or some other intolerable situation, he must have a drink or a cigarette in his hands. His creeping problem is that he increasingly also needs a drink in his hand, even when he’s in a happy situation.
“Elevator / Boone City / Peggy”
Although Al is upper-middle-class, he served as a sergeant in the infantry, which permits March to embody the other characteristic that his best roles always exemplified: The aristocrat with the common touch, as he shows off particularly in his speech, and in a confrontation with Fred.
Speaking of Fred, Dana Andrews’ role as the poor kid who made it to bombardier captain in the Army Air Force, a tortured hero who saw his buddies die in front of his eyes on a burning bomber, permitted him to display his unique blend of easy masculinity and doubt-ridden vulnerability that he’d established in 1944’s Laura.
Andrews had a role big enough to qualify for a Best Actor nomination, along with March, and gave one of a handful of the greatest supporting actor performances ever, up there with Karl Malden in On the Waterfront, and Walter Brennan reading from the telephone book.
This was Andrews’ Oscar, but it was not to be.
“Fred & Peggy”
The Academy wanted to do something for veterans that year. Harold Russell was not only a veteran, but one who’d had both of his hands burned off in an accident. It would have all been fine, if the Academy had simply given Russell the honorary Oscar that it ultimately bestowed on him. But they couldn’t leave well enough alone, and the powers that be not only gave Harold Russell an honorary Oscar, but nominated him for the official Oscar for Best Supporting Actor, as well. And who was going to stand in his way? Not that year.
The citation for Russell’s honorary Oscar reads, “For bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans through his appearance in The Best Years of Our Lives.”
Don’t get me wrong; Russell gave an excellent performance by professional standards; never mind that he was a “civilian.” He was particularly good in his scenes with Dana Andrews. But Andrews gave a performance for the ages.
And that was it for him.
“The Nightmare”
As Al’s daughter, Peggy, Teresa Wright’s insistent performance can be annoying at times, and yet, even it works, because she is paired with Myrna Loy, whose light touch is the perfect counterpoint as her mother, Millie.
“Neighbors / Wilma / Homer's Anger”
This was one of the last pictures that Gregg Toland photographed. His legendary “deep focus” technique of filming a scene on a sharp angle, in order to clearly show the action both in the foreground and background, was put to its best use in the saloon scene, where Al, Homer, and Uncle Butch are in the foreground, but the real action is in the background, as Fred makes a fateful call from the telephone booth at the other end of the bar, a call whose content only Al knows.
Director William Wyler wanted Aaron Copland* to score the picture, but Copland was busy with other projects for the foreseeable future, and so Wyler instead engaged Hugo Friedhofer.
“Fred Asleep”
Friedhofer wrote a bold, ambitious score, but also gave the picture a distinctly Coplandian flavor. (It is impossible to overstate Copland’s influence on American movie music. Even Spike Lee has used his work.) He took an uptempo theme on the speeded-up nature of town life from Copland’s score to the 1937 ballet, Billy the Kid, slowed it down, and made it lush with strings, as the leitmotif of Homer’s longsuffering girlfriend from next-door, Wilma, in expressing her romantic and domestic yearnings.
An earlier musical passage, “The Homecoming,” depicts the emotions felt by the three protagonists, Al Stephenson (Fredric March), Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), and Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) as they ride home in a supply plane. First, during the night while the other men asleep, Homer is filled with foreboding (this passage could be called “Homer’s Theme”). In the morning, the tempo and the men’s (even Homer’s) spirits pick up, as they see the old landscape of Boone City, and having once landed and sharing a taxi, they hit their old hometown, after four years off fighting the war. First comes the thrill of watching city life—their city, with pretty American girls walking down the street all dolled up—and yet, it’s like they’re seeing it for the first time. Then comes the foreboding each man feels as he nears his family home, after having been away for so long. Has the world back home passed them by?
“Homer Goes Upstairs” (Duet Between Homer’s Theme and Wilma’s Theme, Accompanying the Characters’ Debate)
Dana Andrews in the aircraft graveyard scene
Finally, comes the scene at the airplane graveyard, thanks to Friedhofer, Toland, and Andrews, the most powerful scene in the entire picture. That scene comes early in Glory for Me, but Sherwood wisely moved it towards the end, and juxtaposes it with Fred’s father finding the medals and citations for bravery, including the Distinguished Flying Cross—just short of the Medal of Honor—that the humble Fred had not so much as mentioned to him and his stepmother.
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