A Pledge of Emotional Honesty
A Formalist Approach to The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) – Formalist
As Veteran’s Day is this weekend, my partner recommended a film I had been meaning to get to for my own research purposes but had not yet seen, a film exploring the complexities and human cost of serving in the United States military and the less than warm welcome home to the majority of those veterans. I say this with all sincerity, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) is one of the best films I have ever seen, and I am going to struggle to keep this review to one topic because I am in awe of how beautifully shot, emotionally complicated, and unfortunately timeless, this phenomenally simple yet deeply complex film is. But, the Review Roulette wheel landed on Formalist, so let’s focus on that first descriptor, that this film is beautifully shot, directed with emotion first and form second.
I’m going to start out by saying this: if you aren’t a fan of 1940s films in general, if you prefer lots of things and stuff to happen in a fast-paced story, you will not agree that this is a phenomenal film, and that’s fully fair! This film is 170 minutes (2 hours and 50 minutes) long and shows a painfully real, slow growing, powerful depiction of three veterans returning home after World War II and struggling with various afflictions and with the monumental task of carrying their war experiences back with them as they try to pick up their lives where they left them. One thing I deeply value in films from this period especially is their focus on realism. Let’s take a bit of a tangent for a film theory aside:
A Brief Aside on André Bazin and Realism
André Bazin was a French film critic who is sometimes called the father of film criticism. He published his theories and reviews in film magazines between 1943 and 1958 and in 1951 established the still running Cahiers du cinema with Jacques Doniol-Valcroze and Joseph-Marie Lo Duca. Bazin was a champion of realism in film and wrote extensively on all sorts of filmic interpretations, really leading the way for film criticism to be a respected social science and academic subject.
At the core of Bazin’s theory is the idea that film is capturing reality. It can be edited and altered and manipulated to hopefully elicit the desired response of the director, Bazin acknowledges this, but at the core, for Bazin, film captures reality. If a camera is pointed at real people making real sounds and interacting with real objects and backgrounds, things found in the physical world, then that is a reality captured, even when it is building a fictional world or story or expressing an idea from a creative mind, the film captured something with a real existence in the real world. This concept of capturing reality on film is the idea that there is an “objective reality,” that real things from the real world can be caught on film.
Because of this given of objective reality, for Bazin, his preference was for films that leaned into that realism, that created a story reflective of our world where the common denominator was reality and the variable that changed each film was the perspectival shift of the director. He was not a fan of montage (classic editing), for example, because it manipulates the reality seen on screen. (Full disclosure: I am taking liberties with interpreting and simplifying Bazin – people have been fighting about what Bazin wrote for decades, so this is my interpretation of his theoretical and philosophical foundations.)
This given, that film captures objective reality, supports the idea of films as “social documents.” To Bazin, films are reflections of reality that are then curated as influenced by the filmmakers’ (plural) subjective experiences in the world and are ultimately left open to subjective interpretations by the audience. This philosophy – that the film is a reflection of the true world and therefore open to interpretation – is supported by a filmmaker using all of the film at their disposal, that is with keen attention to blocking, mise-en-scène (lit. placing on stage), lighting, camera placement and type (e.g. deep focus, long takes), all of the things they can construct in reality without having to resort to editing to create their action or tell their story.
Why are we taking this detour to discuss Bazin? Because Bazin wrote praising The Best Years of Our Lives as “pure cinema.”
Back to the Review
Wyler and his cinematographer Gregg Toland are geniuses at form. I have read some of Bazin’s writings on the film, and I want to try to avoid them for the most part so as not to just reiterate his views, but one thing to highlight is this beautiful phrasing:
The purpose in this film is not to harass the viewer, to break him upon the wheel and to quarter him. Wyler wants only to allow him to: (1) see everything; (2) make choices ‘of his own will.’ This is an act of loyalty toward the viewer, a pledge of dramatic honesty. Wyler puts his cards on the table.[1]
This compliment to Wyler (and Toland in the wider text) is the heart of the film. The Best Years of Our Lives depicts people living day to day. The first two hours of the film depicts the soldiers coming home and struggling to reintegrate into civilian life, struggling with social changes, with unemployment, with the economic and warmongering fears, with people who can’t (or refuse to) understand their experiences in war changed them. It is raw and it is powerful, and it is almost entirely establishing information for a loose conflict that drives the final third of the film as a necessity of filmmaking. The heart of the film, however, is in the pledge of dramatic honesty in that first half, allowing the audience to see everything and decide for himself what to make of it.
One example of this dedication to showing everything is, in my view, Wyler’s insistence on making the audience sit with their emotions rather than telling them how to feel. Many films will guide the emotional experience, especially when its an uncomfortable experience, by quickly undercutting the discomfort with either humour or a directed emotional statement.
In the first 10 minutes of The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler makes you sit with your discomfort. One of the three veterans followed in the film, Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) has lost his hands in war. This early in the film, Wyler and Toland hold the shot on Homer repeatedly. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) offers Homer a cigarette and places it between the hooks where his hand used to be. Homer is insistent that he can light his own cigarette, pulls out a match from his pocket, lights it, and smokes easily. The camera holds the entire time as you watch this sailor in relatively good spirits managing on his own, but then the reality of the situation sets in. The camera holds so long that you notice his uniform once again and you have time to consider that the three men are on their way home, and if you look away from the hooks, you see Fred and their third companion Al Stephenson (Fredric March) growing ever so slightly uncomfortable. This is as much a statement on disability, as is the whole film, as it is a statement on the fact this disability came from service in the war. Wyler, in 1946, begins this film with a long take that forces the audience to sit in their discomfort in deep focus – everything in perfect view – so that you cannot look away.
Refusing to allow the audience to look away is also the point of the film. For the first two hours to be the situating of veterans back into society and the hardships and pains and loves and challenges and joys that come with such a reunion means you cannot look away. This film is a social document; it forces the audience to sit in the discomfort of knowing that veterans, their veterans, their loved ones could not get jobs or homes or even loans. Many people see this period through rose-tinted lenses that are much more reminiscent of the extreme nostalgia we have for the 1950s. What I mean is that it’s largely forgotten that we were in economic turmoil in the immediate post-war period. Despite the GI Bill of Rights that many point to as proof that the government provided for its veterans, the reality of the GI Bill is that many of the benefits were denied for many of the 1.2 million black veterans, other veterans of colour, and poorer white veterans.
While Wyler does not address the racial aspect of the bill, he does lean into questioning the efficacy of the GI Bill of Rights with another long take later in the film. Al has taken up his work as a banker and is overseeing a loan application to access veteran benefits of a small loan for a small parcel of land. Al is sat at his desk with the veteran applicant to his left-hand side at the end of the desk with the camera opposite him. This framing (see below) allows the audience to only see Al’s face when he cannot bear to look his fellow veteran in the eye when telling him he needs collateral to gamble the bank’s money on this man. He is torn and the camera shows us that while also holding still on the veteran’s face and body language, his confusion as, in his view, he was promised this loan by putting in his time as a serviceman, giving up the best years of his life in which others grew capital and property and skills at home that he now didn’t have to secure the loan for his future. This kind of commentary on the military’s dishonesty with its veterans is spoken to an extent in this specific situation, but that wider social commentary is enhanced by Wyler’s refusal to allow the audience to look away from the veteran’s growing concern and exasperation and fear and desperation in the same way Al looks down and away in his own discomfort. The audience does not have that luxury because, as Bazin says, the audience sees everything with dramatic honesty.
There are very many things I can say about this film (and will in my dissertation!), but these two examples of Wyler’s insistence on emotion and discomfort as a constructive reaction to film are two of my favourites in the film. Wyler and Toland do create pure cinema in this amazing film by demanding active emotional participation on the part of the audience. If complex philosophical and critical views of the US military in a very long film following individuals as they walk through their daily lives is of interest to you, I highly, highly recommend watching The Best Years of Our Lives and embracing the intense emotions it may rile within you.
Because I’m Never Done When I Say I Am
Genre (Kinda)
I could write about this film forever from every perspective on the list, but I will keep this short. War films are a fascinating genre that I don’t venture into frequently, truth be told. I am, however, a massive fan of films reacting to war (hence the dissertation) and this is absolutely that in one of the most unique and beautiful ways, not least for the emotional responses it elicits as explored above. But, thinking about the length of this film, it is rare to have a nearly 180-minute (3 hour!) film in this period when most films were around 90-110 minutes, which got me thinking that most of the other films I can think of from the mid-century with a runtime over 150 minutes (2.5 hours) are other war related films such as Gone With the Wind (1939) or biblical and ancient epics such as Ben Hur (1959) Cleopatra (1963), all three of these examples clocking in at around (240 minutes) 4 hours. It’s fascinating to me that the films in this period that were allowed to be this length were epics: military or otherwise. They were myth-making or, in the case of The Best Years of Our Lives, myth-disrupting, but centred on the mythologies that root the social reflections of Americanism, and I don’t know about you, but that is incredibly interesting to me.
[1] Page 9 of Bazin at Work: Major Essays & Reviews from the Forties & Fifties, translated by Alain Piette and Bert Cardullo
Sorry to be pedantic but the point of the deep focus shot in Bazin's theories is not that the spectator "cannot look away" but exactly the opposite: there are multiple focal points within the frame, and so the spectator *chooses* to look at something important. Also when Bazin refers to montage, he's referring to the Soviet idea of montage as developed by Eisenstein, Kuleshov, et al meaning the basic theory of editing in cinema, not "montage" as we think of it today.