Entry tags:
Do you know anything about building?
All right: this review is overdue by nearly two weeks and I have only slept less since then, but I'm running out of July and ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
skygiants has assured me that so long as my writeup says something more coherent than "HOOKS FOR HANDS!!" I'll be all right. I can guarantee that. Unlike the novel unfairly referenced above, William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was terrific.
I must credit Mark Harris' Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014) for getting me interested in William Wyler. Prior to this spring, I could have told you that I'd seen about half a dozen of his movies and liked several of them, but I didn't know a thing about him personally except that his original choice for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) was Robert Newton and I thought that showed good taste. He was Jewish, a Swiss citizen from then-German Alsace-Lorraine; he came to Hollywood as a distant cousin of Carl Laemmle and quickly worked his way up from stage hand to Universal's youngest director, where his painstaking directing style got him nicknamed either "Forty-" or "Fifty-Take Wyler" depending on which actor you asked and how recently they'd worked with him; I was charmed to learn that for years he commuted to work on a motorcycle. Of the five directors whom Harris tracks through the war, Wyler was the only Jew; the only one with family in danger in Europe.1 He enlisted with the Signal Corps eleven days after Pearl Harbor, thirty-nine years old and a married father of two. In order to get the footage for the film that later became The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), he flew five missions over Germany and occupied France with different B-17 crews of the 91st Bomb Group, including two after he was formally grounded. He shot 16-millimeter footage through the ball turret of the Memphis Belle, a crazy stunt even by the standards of combat pilots. He blacked out once aboard the Our Gang while concentrating so intently on getting good aerial shots that he failed to notice until after the fact that he'd disconnected his oxygen. While in uniform, he punched out an anti-Semitic doorman and accepted an official reprimand rather than lose time defending himself in a court-martial. And most pertinently to this story, following the documentary realist success of The Memphis Belle, Wyler reviewed the unmanned camera footage taken from the P-47 Thunderbolts that were the subject of his next project and agreed with his co-director John Sturges that none of it was usable, even as "atmosphere shots." Just as he had done with the Memphis Belle and the other B-17s, he took a camera—a 35-millimeter Eyemo this time—aboard a low-flying B-25 and shot footage of the coast of Italy through the open windows of the plane. And he lost his hearing. He was permanently grounded. He was discharged from military service at once. His career as a filmmaker for the War Department was over; what he didn't know was whether, as a deaf director, he could ever make films for anyone again.
The happy ending of this story is that, as shattered, disoriented, and despairing as Wyler was when he returned to the U.S. in 1945, his career was not over. He never regained more than a fraction of the hearing in his left ear; for the rest of his life, he would listen to scenes as they were filmed through a feed from the on-set microphones. But if classics like The Heiress (1949), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and The Collector (1965) are anything to judge by, it worked out all right. And all of this means that what we have in The Best Years of Our Lives—Wyler's first post-war film—is something extraordinary for its time: a commercial Hollywood A-picture made by a disabled veteran with combat experience. I wanted to see it at once.2
We were still worried going in. Despite its instant-classic reputation for handling themes of healing, disability, and disillusionment with sensitivity and restraint, by modern standards the film could still have come off as maudlin, simplistic, or condescending. 1946 was a prime Production Code year. We weren't sure how much realism either Wyler or his screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood3 would have been able to put onscreen. Instead, even if the middle-aged couple thoroughly enjoying an active sex life after twenty years of marriage are still shown sleeping in separate beds and the isolationist who gets punched in the face in a satisfying echo of Wyler's doorman dust-up spouts only veiled racism about "a bunch of radicals in Washington," the film is surprisingly even-handed about the chances of its three protagonists, which means that is neither unrelentingly downbeat nor breezily dismissive of the difficulties all three face in their strange new postwar existence, trying to reintegrate into peacetime society with their different experiences and their different kinds of damage.
Those differences are a major factor in the film's realism. There's no such thing as a normative war narrative in The Best Years of Our Lives—if anything, civilian expectations of war experience are consistently, sometimes uncomfortably refuted. Fictional Boone City may be a Midwestern Anytown, but none of the protagonists is standing in for the "typical" soldier. Army Air Forces Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) was a soda jerk before the war; he's returning a decorated bombardier with recurring nightmares and a glamorous wife he knew for barely a month before going overseas. His father and stepmother are affectionate and supportive and live in a two-room tenement behind a railyard. None of his medals translate into a marketable skill set. His nightclub-going wife married a dashing flyboy with a four-hundred-dollar paycheck and doesn't know what to do with an uncertain, unemployed civilian in a secondhand suit. By contrast, Army Sergeant Al Johnson (Fredric March) comes home to the American dream of a loving wife and two children and the "nice fat job at a nice fat bank" that earned them a swanky apartment, but his children are grown and strange to him and there's a sting in the tail of the promotion he can't refuse—as an authentic veteran in charge of loans to ex-servicemen, Al is effectively the bank's plausible deniability for all the requests he's expected to turn down. Domesticity makes him so twitchy that on his first night home, he drags his wife and daughter on a bar crawl that finishes in blackout. No matter where he is, he drinks too much. And Seabee Homer Parrish (non-professional Harold Russell) is missing both of his hands. He served in the South Pacific and never saw any of the islands he's asked about, always being belowdecks: "When we were sunk, all I know is there was a lot of fire and explosions." He's dexterous with his prostheses—a pair of steel split hooks—and he has a quick deflection for every one of the well-intentioned, cringeworthy remarks with which able-bodied strangers try to cover their shock, but his parents' efforts at acceptance only read to him as pity and he can't believe that his childhood sweetheart-next-door finds his new, disabled state anything but repulsive.
You could make a melodrama out of these elements. The Best Years of Our Lives doesn't. It's the film's other strength. The pacing is part of it. The film runs 172 minutes; it's not slow-moving, and in fact quite a lot happens in it, but it doesn't push the plot. There's no artificial tension—the situations themselves are bad enough. A quick-cut montage might get the point across, but it would have a different effect than the recurring observation of Fred's frustrated attempts to find a steady job before he settles for drugstore work again, this time behind the perfume counter at the beck and call of his supercilious former assistant; we appreciate that his wife didn't rabbit on him overnight, but after months of sad-sack scrounging when she was looking forward to hot nights on the town, Marie (Virginia Mayo) is ready for a new lover and a life that's actually fun. She's cruel when she confronts her husband over it, but it's hard to see her as a villain. "The war's over," she tries to encourage him. "You won't get anyplace till you stop thinking about it. Come on, snap out of it!" as if night terrors and daytime anxieties can be taken off and hung in the closet as easily as a uniform. The time the film gives their relationship allows us to see that both of them have tried to make it work. It's just that neither of them is very good at being married and it might not have worked anyway. This is not a film in which love is a panacaea and a wedding ring assures a happy ending. Al and Milly (Myrna Loy) are one of the best depictions of a successful long-term marriage I've seen onscreen: they are independently competent and mutually trusting, emotionally intimate, physically affectionate—in a miracle of editing past the censors, they have so much sex on their first morning together that they're eating second breakfast in their bathrobes by the time the camera cuts back to them—and the film explicitly acknowledges the hard work they've put into it. "How many times have I told you I hated you and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?" They take joy in each other without complacency. It is the reason we feel secure in their future, Al's unresolved drinking problem notwithstanding. Seriously, name me another movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood in which the true proof of love is its uncertainty. We see it with Homer and his fiancée Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell). It is painfully apparent to the audience after a scene or two that his hooks-for-hands make no difference to her view of him as familiar, lovable, and desirable. He can't see himself as any of these things. He avoids her socially when he can get away with it, physically when she seeks him out, refusing to touch her for fear of seeing her recoil—or stick it out grimly, enduring the consequences of the promise she made to the high school quarterback who could throw a forward pass and undress himself—or anyone else—for bed. But she's not blindly faithful, either. "You don't know what it'd be like to have to live with me," Homer warns her. Her response is clear-eyed and pragmatic: "But I can only find out by trying. If it turns out I haven't courage enough, we'll soon know it." She doesn't promise what she cannot realistically imagine. And so Homer leads her upstairs, and shows her what it will be like to get ready for bed with a husband who takes his hands off at night, and Skygiants and I figured the only reason she leaves his room at the end of the scene is the Production Code, because she looks like a woman who knows perfectly well that hands are not the most important thing.
Even the most potentially schmaltzy angle of the plot comes off plausibly. In parallel to the disintegration of his marrige to Marie, Fred is falling in love with Al's adult daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright) and she with him. On the one hand, she's a natural alternative to Marie's pin-up-girl impatience. She's a hospital nurse, so she doesn't flinch from his hoarse cries to a friend who died in a burning plane over Berlin, and she met him on that first drunken night that closed out Homer's uncle's bar,4 so she has no illusions about his current state as opposed to some idealized memory. She doesn't need to be taken dancing every night; whatever she wants him for, it's not the set of his shoulders in uniform. She has her first real fight with her parents over him. (It's hilarious.) In a wartime romance, she'd be the good girl waiting for the hero on his triumphant return. And yet it's far from clear that Fred is ready for a relationship with anyone, even a partner as wholehearted as Peggy. If he's proposing to her in the final scene, it's by no means as certain a gesture as Homer's hooks adroitly sliding a wedding ring onto Wilma's finger. But it's not a hopeless one, either. It's this acknowledgement which gives its power to the celebrated scene in which Fred climbs into the nose of a junked B-17—his old station as a bombardier—and relives his memories of war. It's an impulsive decision; it might be a test of himself, a deliberate attempt at exorcism, an aimless angry movement. And it is amazingly low-key. There's no grimacing, no clutching of hair, no contortions of the body. Crouched on the ruined seat, Fred in his old flight jacket fades behind the pitted, dust-streaked plexiglass: he looks like a double exposure, or damage on the print; he looks like a ghost. His mouth tightens as he leans forward, as if sighting on a distant target below. He's sweating lightly. The noise of the imagined engines burrs against the dissonant score. We never know what else he hears or sees. It's not one specific run; it's not the burning wreckage of his nightmare; there's no single trauma that's haunting him so much as the aggregation of years of combat. And just as the scene feels it should crest or break or do something dramatic, it stops. A construction worker on the ground calls up to Fred, interrupting his concentration. The camera's focus resolves suddenly past the translucent smears and scratches to Fred's face, no longer ghostly, only a little distracted. "Reviving old memories, huh?" says the other man as Fred swings down from the derelict plane, dusting off his hands. "Yeah," he answers, "or maybe getting some of them out of my system." And nothing changes all at once, but things are going to be different, even if only a little. It's small and effective. Wyler mixed the soundtrack himself.
There are no quick fixes in The Best Years of Our Lives. The film admits plainly that some things cannot be fixed at all: so you go on with what you've got, even when that's yourself. Sometimes love helps and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes nothing helps except going on. That's a degree of nuance and maturity I did not expect from a film from 1946, which I think means only that I underestimated William Wyler. Oh, God, it's dawn again. I haven't even mentioned how much I love Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography. This divagation sponsored by my considerate backers at Patreon.
1. Wyler's parents were already in the U.S.; they had followed their son to Hollywood in the '20's. Starting as early as 1936, he tried to get other relatives out: sent money, negotiated endlessly with the State Department to sponsor their emigration. In 1945, he returned for the first time in more than twenty years to his newly liberated birthplace of Mülhausen/Mulhouse. His family and childhood friends were nowhere to be found. He never found them, or what had happened to them, beyond the obvious. The Jews of Mulhouse were gone.
2. I am eliding most of the story of how I ended up at Skygiants' house two Fridays ago with two DVDs of The Best Years of Our Lives, although I remain amused that the library sent me home with both of their apparently identical copies because one of them might be scratched and the librarian wasn't sure which. In fact, we got halfway through the first copy and the disc seized up. We watched the rest of the movie on the other copy.
3. Sherwood was working from MacKinlay Kantor's blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945), which I have not read; Harris details some of the differences in Five Came Back. I don't think I disagree with Wyler's belief that a spastic character would have been unplayable by a non-disabled actor. Once he rewrote the part for a double amputee, he insisted on finding a disabled actor to play it.
4. Homer's uncle Butch is played by Hoagy Carmichael and he is marvelous, a lanky, laid-back pianist-cum-publican who teaches his nephew to play the piano in a scene I will not spoil and reasures him with the long view: "Your folks'll get used to you and you'll get used to them. Then everything will settle down nicely—unless we have another war. Then none of us have to worry because we'll all be blown to bits on the first day. So cheer up!" And after that I had Tom Lehrer stuck in my head.
skygiants has assured me that so long as my writeup says something more coherent than "HOOKS FOR HANDS!!" I'll be all right. I can guarantee that. Unlike the novel unfairly referenced above, William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was terrific.I must credit Mark Harris' Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War (2014) for getting me interested in William Wyler. Prior to this spring, I could have told you that I'd seen about half a dozen of his movies and liked several of them, but I didn't know a thing about him personally except that his original choice for Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1939) was Robert Newton and I thought that showed good taste. He was Jewish, a Swiss citizen from then-German Alsace-Lorraine; he came to Hollywood as a distant cousin of Carl Laemmle and quickly worked his way up from stage hand to Universal's youngest director, where his painstaking directing style got him nicknamed either "Forty-" or "Fifty-Take Wyler" depending on which actor you asked and how recently they'd worked with him; I was charmed to learn that for years he commuted to work on a motorcycle. Of the five directors whom Harris tracks through the war, Wyler was the only Jew; the only one with family in danger in Europe.1 He enlisted with the Signal Corps eleven days after Pearl Harbor, thirty-nine years old and a married father of two. In order to get the footage for the film that later became The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), he flew five missions over Germany and occupied France with different B-17 crews of the 91st Bomb Group, including two after he was formally grounded. He shot 16-millimeter footage through the ball turret of the Memphis Belle, a crazy stunt even by the standards of combat pilots. He blacked out once aboard the Our Gang while concentrating so intently on getting good aerial shots that he failed to notice until after the fact that he'd disconnected his oxygen. While in uniform, he punched out an anti-Semitic doorman and accepted an official reprimand rather than lose time defending himself in a court-martial. And most pertinently to this story, following the documentary realist success of The Memphis Belle, Wyler reviewed the unmanned camera footage taken from the P-47 Thunderbolts that were the subject of his next project and agreed with his co-director John Sturges that none of it was usable, even as "atmosphere shots." Just as he had done with the Memphis Belle and the other B-17s, he took a camera—a 35-millimeter Eyemo this time—aboard a low-flying B-25 and shot footage of the coast of Italy through the open windows of the plane. And he lost his hearing. He was permanently grounded. He was discharged from military service at once. His career as a filmmaker for the War Department was over; what he didn't know was whether, as a deaf director, he could ever make films for anyone again.
The happy ending of this story is that, as shattered, disoriented, and despairing as Wyler was when he returned to the U.S. in 1945, his career was not over. He never regained more than a fraction of the hearing in his left ear; for the rest of his life, he would listen to scenes as they were filmed through a feed from the on-set microphones. But if classics like The Heiress (1949), Roman Holiday (1953), Ben-Hur (1959), and The Collector (1965) are anything to judge by, it worked out all right. And all of this means that what we have in The Best Years of Our Lives—Wyler's first post-war film—is something extraordinary for its time: a commercial Hollywood A-picture made by a disabled veteran with combat experience. I wanted to see it at once.2
We were still worried going in. Despite its instant-classic reputation for handling themes of healing, disability, and disillusionment with sensitivity and restraint, by modern standards the film could still have come off as maudlin, simplistic, or condescending. 1946 was a prime Production Code year. We weren't sure how much realism either Wyler or his screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood3 would have been able to put onscreen. Instead, even if the middle-aged couple thoroughly enjoying an active sex life after twenty years of marriage are still shown sleeping in separate beds and the isolationist who gets punched in the face in a satisfying echo of Wyler's doorman dust-up spouts only veiled racism about "a bunch of radicals in Washington," the film is surprisingly even-handed about the chances of its three protagonists, which means that is neither unrelentingly downbeat nor breezily dismissive of the difficulties all three face in their strange new postwar existence, trying to reintegrate into peacetime society with their different experiences and their different kinds of damage.
Those differences are a major factor in the film's realism. There's no such thing as a normative war narrative in The Best Years of Our Lives—if anything, civilian expectations of war experience are consistently, sometimes uncomfortably refuted. Fictional Boone City may be a Midwestern Anytown, but none of the protagonists is standing in for the "typical" soldier. Army Air Forces Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) was a soda jerk before the war; he's returning a decorated bombardier with recurring nightmares and a glamorous wife he knew for barely a month before going overseas. His father and stepmother are affectionate and supportive and live in a two-room tenement behind a railyard. None of his medals translate into a marketable skill set. His nightclub-going wife married a dashing flyboy with a four-hundred-dollar paycheck and doesn't know what to do with an uncertain, unemployed civilian in a secondhand suit. By contrast, Army Sergeant Al Johnson (Fredric March) comes home to the American dream of a loving wife and two children and the "nice fat job at a nice fat bank" that earned them a swanky apartment, but his children are grown and strange to him and there's a sting in the tail of the promotion he can't refuse—as an authentic veteran in charge of loans to ex-servicemen, Al is effectively the bank's plausible deniability for all the requests he's expected to turn down. Domesticity makes him so twitchy that on his first night home, he drags his wife and daughter on a bar crawl that finishes in blackout. No matter where he is, he drinks too much. And Seabee Homer Parrish (non-professional Harold Russell) is missing both of his hands. He served in the South Pacific and never saw any of the islands he's asked about, always being belowdecks: "When we were sunk, all I know is there was a lot of fire and explosions." He's dexterous with his prostheses—a pair of steel split hooks—and he has a quick deflection for every one of the well-intentioned, cringeworthy remarks with which able-bodied strangers try to cover their shock, but his parents' efforts at acceptance only read to him as pity and he can't believe that his childhood sweetheart-next-door finds his new, disabled state anything but repulsive.
You could make a melodrama out of these elements. The Best Years of Our Lives doesn't. It's the film's other strength. The pacing is part of it. The film runs 172 minutes; it's not slow-moving, and in fact quite a lot happens in it, but it doesn't push the plot. There's no artificial tension—the situations themselves are bad enough. A quick-cut montage might get the point across, but it would have a different effect than the recurring observation of Fred's frustrated attempts to find a steady job before he settles for drugstore work again, this time behind the perfume counter at the beck and call of his supercilious former assistant; we appreciate that his wife didn't rabbit on him overnight, but after months of sad-sack scrounging when she was looking forward to hot nights on the town, Marie (Virginia Mayo) is ready for a new lover and a life that's actually fun. She's cruel when she confronts her husband over it, but it's hard to see her as a villain. "The war's over," she tries to encourage him. "You won't get anyplace till you stop thinking about it. Come on, snap out of it!" as if night terrors and daytime anxieties can be taken off and hung in the closet as easily as a uniform. The time the film gives their relationship allows us to see that both of them have tried to make it work. It's just that neither of them is very good at being married and it might not have worked anyway. This is not a film in which love is a panacaea and a wedding ring assures a happy ending. Al and Milly (Myrna Loy) are one of the best depictions of a successful long-term marriage I've seen onscreen: they are independently competent and mutually trusting, emotionally intimate, physically affectionate—in a miracle of editing past the censors, they have so much sex on their first morning together that they're eating second breakfast in their bathrobes by the time the camera cuts back to them—and the film explicitly acknowledges the hard work they've put into it. "How many times have I told you I hated you and believed it in my heart? How many times have you said you were sick and tired of me, that we were all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?" They take joy in each other without complacency. It is the reason we feel secure in their future, Al's unresolved drinking problem notwithstanding. Seriously, name me another movie from the Golden Age of Hollywood in which the true proof of love is its uncertainty. We see it with Homer and his fiancée Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell). It is painfully apparent to the audience after a scene or two that his hooks-for-hands make no difference to her view of him as familiar, lovable, and desirable. He can't see himself as any of these things. He avoids her socially when he can get away with it, physically when she seeks him out, refusing to touch her for fear of seeing her recoil—or stick it out grimly, enduring the consequences of the promise she made to the high school quarterback who could throw a forward pass and undress himself—or anyone else—for bed. But she's not blindly faithful, either. "You don't know what it'd be like to have to live with me," Homer warns her. Her response is clear-eyed and pragmatic: "But I can only find out by trying. If it turns out I haven't courage enough, we'll soon know it." She doesn't promise what she cannot realistically imagine. And so Homer leads her upstairs, and shows her what it will be like to get ready for bed with a husband who takes his hands off at night, and Skygiants and I figured the only reason she leaves his room at the end of the scene is the Production Code, because she looks like a woman who knows perfectly well that hands are not the most important thing.
Even the most potentially schmaltzy angle of the plot comes off plausibly. In parallel to the disintegration of his marrige to Marie, Fred is falling in love with Al's adult daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright) and she with him. On the one hand, she's a natural alternative to Marie's pin-up-girl impatience. She's a hospital nurse, so she doesn't flinch from his hoarse cries to a friend who died in a burning plane over Berlin, and she met him on that first drunken night that closed out Homer's uncle's bar,4 so she has no illusions about his current state as opposed to some idealized memory. She doesn't need to be taken dancing every night; whatever she wants him for, it's not the set of his shoulders in uniform. She has her first real fight with her parents over him. (It's hilarious.) In a wartime romance, she'd be the good girl waiting for the hero on his triumphant return. And yet it's far from clear that Fred is ready for a relationship with anyone, even a partner as wholehearted as Peggy. If he's proposing to her in the final scene, it's by no means as certain a gesture as Homer's hooks adroitly sliding a wedding ring onto Wilma's finger. But it's not a hopeless one, either. It's this acknowledgement which gives its power to the celebrated scene in which Fred climbs into the nose of a junked B-17—his old station as a bombardier—and relives his memories of war. It's an impulsive decision; it might be a test of himself, a deliberate attempt at exorcism, an aimless angry movement. And it is amazingly low-key. There's no grimacing, no clutching of hair, no contortions of the body. Crouched on the ruined seat, Fred in his old flight jacket fades behind the pitted, dust-streaked plexiglass: he looks like a double exposure, or damage on the print; he looks like a ghost. His mouth tightens as he leans forward, as if sighting on a distant target below. He's sweating lightly. The noise of the imagined engines burrs against the dissonant score. We never know what else he hears or sees. It's not one specific run; it's not the burning wreckage of his nightmare; there's no single trauma that's haunting him so much as the aggregation of years of combat. And just as the scene feels it should crest or break or do something dramatic, it stops. A construction worker on the ground calls up to Fred, interrupting his concentration. The camera's focus resolves suddenly past the translucent smears and scratches to Fred's face, no longer ghostly, only a little distracted. "Reviving old memories, huh?" says the other man as Fred swings down from the derelict plane, dusting off his hands. "Yeah," he answers, "or maybe getting some of them out of my system." And nothing changes all at once, but things are going to be different, even if only a little. It's small and effective. Wyler mixed the soundtrack himself.
There are no quick fixes in The Best Years of Our Lives. The film admits plainly that some things cannot be fixed at all: so you go on with what you've got, even when that's yourself. Sometimes love helps and sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes nothing helps except going on. That's a degree of nuance and maturity I did not expect from a film from 1946, which I think means only that I underestimated William Wyler. Oh, God, it's dawn again. I haven't even mentioned how much I love Gregg Toland's deep-focus cinematography. This divagation sponsored by my considerate backers at Patreon.
1. Wyler's parents were already in the U.S.; they had followed their son to Hollywood in the '20's. Starting as early as 1936, he tried to get other relatives out: sent money, negotiated endlessly with the State Department to sponsor their emigration. In 1945, he returned for the first time in more than twenty years to his newly liberated birthplace of Mülhausen/Mulhouse. His family and childhood friends were nowhere to be found. He never found them, or what had happened to them, beyond the obvious. The Jews of Mulhouse were gone.
2. I am eliding most of the story of how I ended up at Skygiants' house two Fridays ago with two DVDs of The Best Years of Our Lives, although I remain amused that the library sent me home with both of their apparently identical copies because one of them might be scratched and the librarian wasn't sure which. In fact, we got halfway through the first copy and the disc seized up. We watched the rest of the movie on the other copy.
3. Sherwood was working from MacKinlay Kantor's blank-verse novel Glory for Me (1945), which I have not read; Harris details some of the differences in Five Came Back. I don't think I disagree with Wyler's belief that a spastic character would have been unplayable by a non-disabled actor. Once he rewrote the part for a double amputee, he insisted on finding a disabled actor to play it.
4. Homer's uncle Butch is played by Hoagy Carmichael and he is marvelous, a lanky, laid-back pianist-cum-publican who teaches his nephew to play the piano in a scene I will not spoil and reasures him with the long view: "Your folks'll get used to you and you'll get used to them. Then everything will settle down nicely—unless we have another war. Then none of us have to worry because we'll all be blown to bits on the first day. So cheer up!" And after that I had Tom Lehrer stuck in my head.
no subject
no subject
Yes! All the women in this story are people. The film takes it for granted that they're people. It's astonishing and deeply welcome. The story would have been so much thinner without them.
You should write about this movie.
no subject
OHMYGOD.
no subject
What is it about Hoagy Carmichael? I've only seen him here and in To Have and Have Not (1944).
no subject
Carmichael was a Republican and anti-FDR, voting for Wendell Willkie for president in 1940, and was often aghast at the left-leaning political views of his friends in Hollywood.
....MAYBE NOT. omg my Dad must never know, it would give him a stroke
no subject
Your Dad and Steve can still like his music!
no subject
no subject
I really don't envy Steve trying to catch up on current American politics. It's not like the '40's were actually simplistic, but, like, just trying to explain the concept of a megachurch . . .
no subject
-- Altho I'm finishing The Watchdog That Didn't Bark: The Financial Crisis and the Disappearance of Investigative Journalism and I have to say, I do think Steve would find a lot of the oligarchic megacorporations with their deep influence in politics and freedom from legal restraint horrifyingly familiar. THERE HAS BEEN NO PROGRESS ON THIS? he would rant to Sam in the kitchen. HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE? and Sam and Bucky would exchange long-suffering looks and split the last muffin. (Sam: "He's mellowed out now, right?" Bucky: "A little bit, yeah." Sam: "Good thing for us all you didn't smother him with a pillow, man." Bucky: "I thought about it when he kept bugging me to read Ida Tarbell on Standard Oil.")
no subject
*Three since 2002 apparently!
no subject
no subject
no subject
It deserves its classic status! It's always so nice when that happens!
no subject
Nine
no subject
Thank you! I really liked it and I wanted to do it justice.
no subject
no subject
Thank you! It's just really good. All the ways in which it's subversive are so casually and normally presented that it can take the viewer a little while to realize, wait a minute, that's an all-American film from the 1940's in which adulterous attraction is rewarded and alcoholism isn't played for laughs and retail culture is stultifying and even the scene where the bigot gets his isn't a two-fisted fantasy, because in the real world if you punch out a customer on the job, you can kiss your job goodbye (and Fred does). All of its women are people. That's radical all on its own. And it's not that Hollywood never produced a realistic drama before, but it's so matter-of-fact here: it doesn't underplay and it doesn't sensationalize and so these people's lives are just lives, not exemplars or object lessons, no matter how fucked-up or fragmented or reinvented they look from the outside. Is it normal for most people to have hooks for hands? Not especially. But it's normal for Homer, now, and that's how the film looks at him. That feels rare to me even now.
people's lives are just lives
Catherine Wyler (who would have been a pre-schooler at the time her father was doing dangerous things in a Flying Fortress) was one of the producers of the mostly fictional 1990 film "Memphis Belle." Somewhat more interesting than the movie was the making-of documentary "Belle and the Glory-Boys." It has clips from the 1944 documentary interspersed with new stuff. Wyler got all the original crew together and flew them to England to meet the actors playing the fictional crew. Some interesting reflections from all of the guys.
I own it on VHS but it's here on Youtube:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zv_BWp2qzjE
Re: people's lives are just lives
It's not the ordinariness of the lives of people who came back from WWII that surprises me; it's the ability of a Hollywood film to reflect them accurately that I find rare and valuable, because the usual approach would be either much more dramatic or much more deliberately universal.
Somewhat more interesting than the movie was the making-of documentary "Belle and the Glory-Boys." It has clips from the 1944 documentary interspersed with new stuff. Wyler got all the original crew together and flew them to England to meet the actors playing the fictional crew. Some interesting reflections from all of the guys.
Neat; thank you!
no subject
I will one day write a story in which a man's going off to war was a cowardly escape from something tricky he didn't want to face at home--maybe a child born with a disability to his lover--and where the woman must struggle and be heroic on her own--maybe, herself, in a war zone, while he meanwhile whiles away the war at a desk job--and then he wants to come home and marry her and collect for himself a ready-made family (for some ignoble reason) but she, meanwhile, will have found the love of someone worthy and will have no time for him.
no subject
But oh GOD, I resent about historical war movies the fact (and it is a fact, so I suppose I'm resenting reality) that it's the men who have had the honor and the terror of serving and suffering, and the women... must just react to them. Leave them or stand by them, understand them or fail to understand them.
That's one of the reasons I love The Gentle Sex (1943) so much: it is a war story to which men are not quite incidental, but of which they are certainly neither the center nor even the other half of the story.
I will one day write a story in which a man's going off to war was a cowardly escape from something tricky he didn't want to face at home--maybe a child born with a disability to his lover--and where the woman must struggle and be heroic on her own--maybe, herself, in a war zone, while he meanwhile whiles away the war at a desk job--and then he wants to come home and marry her and collect for himself a ready-made family (for some ignoble reason) but she, meanwhile, will have found the love of someone worthy and will have no time for him.
YOU TOTALLY SHOULD. I feel like there might be similar stories, but not specifically this one, and I am all for it.
no subject
no subject
no subject
I apologize for the year's delay in replying to this comment: I just seem to have seen it now. It's a wonderful movie. May I ask about your nine other top choices?
An activating review!
I'd reflexively avoided it because I'd assumed it was a "feel good" movie celebrating veterans' involuntary sacrifices -- thank you for thoroughly debunking my cynicism.
I don't think I disagree with Wyler's belief that a spastic character would have been unplayable by a non-disabled actor.
Yet at least two nondisabled actors have won Oscars for just that:
I'm going to hold fast to the notion that the disabled director guide the project away from the rocky shores of inspiration porn. Happily it's available on Blu-ray from my library.
Re: An activating review!
You're welcome! It worked for me and it surprised me. I think Wyler put a lot of himself into it, but I also think he listened to other veterans' experiences, and it made a difference. It indirectly inspired this poem about my grandparents and non-normative war stories, too.
Yet at least two nondisabled actors have won Oscars for just that
Oof.
Harold Russell, for the record, won a Best Supporting Oscar for his role as Homer. He was not a professional actor—he became a disability rights activist instead, particularly for disabled veterans—but he deserved the award. He wasn't playing himself. He was high-profile proof that disability did not need to be impersonated for the screen.
I'm going to hold fast to the notion that the disabled director guide the project away from the rocky shores of inspiration porn. Happily it's available on Blu-ray from my library.
Nice of your library! Enjoy!