The Best Years of Our Lives

I picked up this movie at the library solely for the purpose that it won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1946. I had never heard of the movie. I did not know any of the actors in the movie. And the DVD cover looked more like a soap opera cover.

The basic premise of the movie is 3 men are returning home from World War II and they must readjust to the world they left. All 3 hitch a ride on a B-17 as it crosses the country. One man, Harold Russell, is from the Navy. He had his hands blown off in a non-combat incident. Originally written as a seaman who lost his hands in a combat mission, the part was rewritten for Russell who really did lose his hands to a non-combat incident. Another is a captain, Dana Andrews, in the Army and the third, Fredric March, is a Sergeant.

Ironically, the high ranking captain returns to the drugstore where he worked only to find his position gone, but does get a job working at the perfume counter. The Sergeant, on the other hand, is a high ranking banker who easily gets his job back. The seaman, however, spends little time on his career, if at all, but focuses on his girlfriend and the challenges of being in a world without hands.

In another subplot, Andrews returns to his wife that he married just before he shipped off. He doesn't seem to love her as much as he thought he did. On the other hand, he met the Sergeant's daughter, Peggy Stevenson, who's probably in her 20's, and they think may be falling in love with each other.

In typical 1940's post-World War II fashion, in the end everything is all hunky-dory. However, the movie was the first to deal with the problems that many soldiers faced after the war. The movie was met with much acclimation and after the Korean War in the early 1950's it was re-released.

The movie itself, in my opinion, was not that great. However, it was very relevant for the time and often that is what makes a movie important. I gave this movie 3 stars from a movie viewing perspective. If you are searching for movies of importance, then I would view this as a 5 star movie.