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 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. ( Other things may have changed, but that hasn't. )

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.

That's the bathroom. And it's full of fish

So at the end of June I began my introduction to Sam Peckinpah with Ride the High Country (1962) and this month I've continued the project with The Wild Bunch (1969), Straw Dogs (1971), and The Getaway (1972) and I am returning to the Somerville this Wednesday for Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia (1974) because I really want to know what kind of movie belongs to that title, but I am not talking about any of these movies tonight because I don't have the time. I am sleeping very little and I miss the sea so much that I'm reading and listening to maritime things to make myself feel better. Hence Miranda (1948).

I don't know what it was about 1948 that produced two mermaid movies within four months of each other, but you can find them on either side of the Atlantic: Mr. Peabody and the Mermaid in the U.S. and Miranda in the UK. Both feature married men whose fishing vacations entangle them with alluring mermaids and suspicious wives, although my memories of the American film suggest that the similarities end there: Ann Blyth's wordless, childlike Lenore is a figure of fantasy in William Powell's midlife crisis, while Glynis Johns as the eponymous Miranda is quite real, outspoken, and decidedly adult. She is a magnificent siren. None of the men in the story stand a chance. Viewers of various genders may feel likewise.

The premise of the film is straightforward: on a fishing holiday in Cornwall, good-looking doctor Paul Martin (Griffith Jones) finds himself the catch instead, pulled overboard into the cave of a mermaid who agrees to let him return to London only if he brings her with him. He disguises her as a wealthy young invalid and installs her in his apartment, explaining away the eccentricities of her behavior and her diet with the necessities of an invented rest cure, but his wife Clare (Googie Withers) is no fool; she doesn't make the leap from metaphorical to literal siren at once, but eventually somebody's going to notice that the ornamental fish are disappearing from the aquarium in the parlor while every heterosexual male within earshot of Miranda falls all over himself to attract her attention. The casual mix of folklore and light comedy is one of the film's delights. We learn quite early on that Miranda's last name is Trewella; half a movie later, it's offhandedly confirmed that her great-grandmother was the Mermaid of Zennor. She's always cool to the touch. She sleeps in a cold salted bath with seaweed for comfort and shells she brought from her native waters. Taken to the zoo for the day, she steals a fish meant for the seal exhibit—the last silvery edge of tail disappearing into Miranda's mouth is a worthy forerunner of Madison biting through the back of the lobster in Splash (1984)—and exchanges a volley of barky insults with the offended pinniped; she delights a cockle vendor by standing the crowd a round of bivalves and then singlehandedly cleaning him out, leaving nothing but a litter of shells. The tail effects are sparing but effective. Out of the water, her fins are always restlessly flickering, curling with contentment in a curious catlike motion; swimming, she has the dolphin-backed curve of a dive down cold; underwater, she moves with an easy sleek ripple and the floating clouds of her hair hide the details of her nudity, not the fact of it. Equally refreshing is her frank nonhumanness, which is not the same thing as naïveté. In her sea-cave in Cornwall, she reads water-wrinkled issues of Vogue and theater magazines that she's stolen from boats and beaches; her trip to London is full of wonders, but she wants more than anything to see an opera at Covent Garden, where the people might sing almost as well as mermaids. She doesn't have the longing of Andersen's mermaid for the land, but she plans to enjoy it while she has the chance.

And otherwise the film behaves very much like a bedroom farce where three men are interested in the same woman and three women have their suspicions without being able to prove anything and the woman at the center of the controversy is cheerfully and unconcernedly sincere in her desire for all three of her lovers, because why shouldn't she be? Paul was the first man she caught and kept, but lovestruck chauffeur Charles (David Tomlinson) blushes so endearingly when Miranda purrs over the size of his ears, while bohemian artist Nigel (John McCallum) irresistibly insists on painting her. The question is which one she'll choose to give her what she wants: a child fathered by the land. True to the folklore of merrows, Miranda finds sea-men unappealing and is set on netting a more handsome mate. Not that any of them imagine that she wants them for so practical and disposable a purpose, of course. Like a spell, she asks them to repeat her name and they fall into her sea-cold arms, murmuring, Miranda, Miranda; they preen like bowerbirds for the right to carry her around in their arms instead of pushing her properly in her bath-chair; each of them fancies himself the only man remarkable enough to attract the attention of such an enchanting creature as Miss Trewella. I appreciate, though, that none of her enchantment is coyness or conventional flirtation; she doesn't need it. Humans are the ones who tangle themselves up with morality and modesty and awkward, indirect, counterproductive courting behaviors. Miranda's approaches are direct and bracing as the slap of a wave and Johns' rough cat's tongue of a voice makes her immediately persuasive without falling back on coquetry. I know less about the British Board of Film Censors than about the Motion Picture Production Code, but I'm fairly certainly the film's ending wouldn't have passed in this country. Good for Miranda.

Having imprinted on Splash as a very young child, I am always looking for good mermaid movies; this is one. Peter Blackmore adapted the script from his own stage play and I keep meaning to track the original down and read it. (He also authored a much later sequel called Mad About Men (1954), but all signs point to it not being as good, so I've decided I don't need to see it.) I should mention before I try to pass out for the night that if you have fond memories of David Lean's Blithe Spirit (1945), the redoubtable Margaret Rutherford very nearly co-stars here as Nurse Carey, who is overjoyed to discover that her new charge is a real mermaid; she and Miranda bond instantly and I would have cheerfully watched the two of them take in the sights of London from a sea-slanted perspective for another hour. Oh, and if you like fish, don't watch this movie without some on hand. At least, 80 minutes of a character who eats nothing but raw oysters and fish sandwiches and seaweed made me want sushi like nothing on earth. This seaside excursion sponsored by my sympathetic backers at Patreon.