The Best Years of Our Lives - 1946

The Best Years of Our Lives, released in 1946 was, essentially, about 1946, illustrating a year ironically more tenuous than celebratory, in a victorious nation etched with anxiety about its future. The year 1946 means a little less to us today, except as the start of the Baby Boom. We are fairly egocentric about things like that.

Director William Wyler shows the problems of three veterans: of Homer’s prosthetic hooks; of Al’s restless dissatisfaction with his bank job and his ready relief in drink; and of Fred’s disillusionment that the wife, home in the suburbs, and good job he thought would be waiting for him after the war have fizzled out, one by one. Dana Andrews plays Fred, spending much of the movie lugging around an overstuffed army suitcase, trying to find “home.”

Wyler’s treatment of Homer, played by amputee Harold Russell, was sensitive and straightforward. Homer pulls his hooks out into view early in the film when he signs his name on a paper. We see Homer shaking “hands” repeatedly through the film, knocking on doors, drinking, eating, handling money in a billfold, never hiding his hooks but using them as naturally and as often as he would his hands, even playfully banging out “Chopsticks” in a piano duet. Wyler forces us to look at the hooks. In one splendid scene, Homer visits his uncle’s bar, and feeling at home with his pals and away from the nervousness of his family, proceeds to hold a conversation while pushing his sailor hat back farther on his head, handling a beer in a pilsner glass, shaking “hands,” and slamming his hook down on the bar as a man might slam his fist to make a point. It is stupendous for its very naturalness and simplicity.

The minor actors in The Best Years of Our Lives tell us even more about the three veterans. Fred’s father, played by Roman Bohnen, has a very brief but exceptionally moving scene as he reads aloud his son’s war citations. Homer’s younger sister, not uncomfortable with his hooks like the grownups, stares openly fascinated at them as children will. Ray Collins is both pompous and subtly sinister as Al’s hypocritical boss. Hoagy Carmichael plays the easygoing Uncle Butch, who gives Homer a sense of perspective.

It is left to the minor characters of Butch and Al’s son, Rob, to introduce the post-war world for us by discussing the atom bomb. The central characters are too preoccupied with jobs, and fitting into their families, and fitting into their civilian clothes to care about the new geopolitical realities. Rob refers to the recent enemy as “Japanese” with a delicacy that eludes his veteran father, who persists in referring to them as “Japs.”

Wyler, with subtle observation even manages to put a toe across Hollywood’s color bar by training the camera’s eye on the African-American ex-GI who waits to go home just as Al, Homer, and Fred must wait at the ATC depot. A black soldier brings his family into Fred’s drug store and is seen buying candy for his two children. The man standing in line next to Fred at the unemployment office is an African American. It is as if Wyler hints there is a parallel story here to the one of Al, Homer, and Fred, but we only get a peek.

Another legacy to us comes from the man with the flag pin on his lapel who challenges Homer to consider that a left-wing conspiracy brought the nation to war. Al, played by Oscar winner Fredric March, chides the stuffy bankers at his welcome home banquet of their suspicion of “do-gooders” and “radicals.” Today, these salvos between right and left have been diminished to a toxic cliché about blue states and red states. We are a nation fighting a nearly 20-year-old war today, and many of us wear flag pins on our lapels, but the civilian population has not been called upon to make sacrifices. Only civilians who have loved ones in the military have made sacrifices. The rest are untouched and uninvolved. It was not so in World War II.

In this film, the women the three men have come home to are not diminished; is it their story, too. Al’s wife Milly, played by Myrna Loy, and his daughter Peggy, played by Teresa Wright, display heartsick fears and frank desires. One of the most memorable scenes in the film is Fred’s nightmare, when a drunken Fred is put to bed by Peggy, a young woman he met only hours before, suffers a nightmare from what today would be called post-traumatic stress, and is comforted by Peggy, in her bed, yet there is nothing sensationalized or exploitive about it.

It is a movie whose musical score, composed by Hugo Friedhofer did not produce any catchy pop tunes, but captured each moment of conscience the way a shadow follows a body. The otherworldly sensation of Al’s first waking in his own bed after years of jungle is punctuated by the musical score; the delicate strains of the refrain that opens the film and reprises through every moment of tenderness or tension, a piece of music unnamed but unmistakable, captures the moments and meanings that makes mere lyrics inarticulate. The astonishing burst of brass ripple that begins the airplane engine noise as Fred sits in the nose of a trashed plane, experiencing a wartime flashback, all these musical incidents are by turns touching and devastating.

The Best Years of Our Lives was made in the first year of the Baby Boom, and now the Boomers are retiring, those that can. Their parents’ generation could be no better represented than by Harold Russell, who enlisted the day after Pearl Harbor, and later lost his hands. Two of the many Academy Awards won by that film were won by him. As a senior citizen, he sold them both in 1992, to pay for his wife’s medical bills. Retirement, as the Boomers are learning, also has its horrors.

We can only imagine what lay in store for the characters. There is no hint of the space race, the Civil Rights movement, or Vietnam, and perhaps it is just that very perspective knowing what we know now about the peace after the war, where we have succeeded as a nation and where we have failed, that adds a certain eeriness of hindsight that matches Hugo Friedhofer’s music.

There are no sure happy endings in this film. We are never told if Al is going to get a grip on his reaching for a drink in an awkward situation, but we know Milly will be there to support him. We see Homer marry his sweetheart, but his triumph in adjusting to civilian life is tempered by the real knowledge that he will never be able to turn a doorknob or button his own shirt. He will always need a little help with some things.

We are never clearly told when the “best years” were, if it was before the war, during the war, or the years yet to come. The title is ambiguous. There is no fairy tale ending for Fred and Peggy, either. Fred is the last one of the three to take off his uniform, when a job offer in construction is finally made to him, and he symbolically puts the war behind him by stripping off his bomber jacket to go to work.

When Fred and Peggy finally embrace at the end of the film he tells her that it won’t be easy, that they will have to work, “get kicked around.” It is the last line of the film, and not very romantic. She beams a radiant smile, wondrous at only the positive side of his double-edged declaration, completely ignoring the warning. We see the warning. We are still imagining their uncertain future more than seventy years after the first year of the big peace.

*********

Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.

Las Vegas Story - 1952

“Las Vegas Story” (1952) is like the seductively slow Mona Lisa smile of its star, Jane Russell: both sly and simple, secretive and open. It’s a noir that loses a lot of its noir shadows in the bleached, unblinking sunshine of the desert. Like the city for which it’s named, this movie does its own thing in its own way.

This week we adventure in Las Vegas -- with Jane Russell and Victor Mature today, and on Thursday we’ll have Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956). I hope it proves to be a lucky start to a lucky year.  By the way, we once featured publicity for this movie at this previous post.

“Las Vegas Story” is a crime drama. Jane Russell is the wife of Vincent Price, a suave, well-heeled businessman from the east out here on a pleasure trip to try his luck. The couple are followed by a very handsome pest played by Brad Dexter, who though obviously attracted to Miss Russell, is even more attracted to the gaudy diamond necklace she wears.

The necklace will figure prominently in a murder.

There are a few subplots to the story that keep us entertained while we’re waiting for the crime to happen. So entertained that, in fact, the crime story seems almost like an afterthought. First, there is the back story about Jane Russell, who during the War was a singer in one of the casinos here. She’s here not to gamble, but to come to grips with her past.

“I have a feeling I interrupted a conversation between you and the desert,” Vincent Price tells her in what I think might be my favorite line from the movie. Perhaps it’s just his charming, sensitive delivery. He has broken away from the gaming tables briefly to notice she has wandered off by herself, alone outside on the terrace. They appear to have a comfortable, affectionate relationship, but something is nagging each of them that has nothing to do with the other.

Vincent Price, too focused on gambling to pay much attention to her anyway, indulgently allows her to sort out a few old ghosts, and suggests she go off on her own to explore the Strip.

“Go ahead. Get it out of your system,” he tells her.

She heads for her old hangout, a casino called The Last Chance. There’s Hoagy Carmichael at the piano, playing “I Get Along Without You Very Well.” I love when Hoagy’s at the piano when we walk in the door.

This is an exquisite scene. Jane Russell stands some distance away from where Hoagy is seated at his piano. He doesn't know she's there.  At once we see she is remembering days gone by. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a flashback done with such sensitivity and such style. In a close-up on her face, we see her eyes wander around the room and then lock on a small table with an empty chair. From the chair, we go back to a close-up of her face, and her eyes gently move to something beyond the piano. We hear the echo of a woman’s voice singing. In another moment the camera shows us…

…she is watching herself. A younger, happier woman, with longer 1940s style hair. The room is full of GIs, and a large flag hangs on a back wall. Victor Mature is seated at the empty chair, dressed in an Army uniform, adoring her.

We go back to Jane’s expression as she remembers.  Her face registers the wonder of recognition, the co-mingling pleasure and pain of memory.  Usually in a flashback scene, we are dropped into the past, and when the scene is over, we get wrenched back to the present.  Here, the camera keeps shifting from the scene to her face watching it. We never completely enter the flashback; we always have one foot in the present, just as she is firmly rooted in the present but cannot let go of the past. She is stuck between two worlds emotionally, and in this scene, literally. This marvelous tactic makes the memory seem like real-time.

What Jane Russell does just with her eyes, and with the slightest flicker of sublte expression is so impressive. This scene is a skillful union between a starlet who rose to fame on her voluptuous figure but who clearly really could act, and a director, Robert Stevenson, who with admirable delicacy, pays more attention to her face than her chest.

The movie was produced by Howard Hughes, second to none for his famous appreciation and promotion of her décolleté.  While we have the obligatory costuming and camera angles that showcase Miss Russell’s physical attributes (including a gratuitous shower scene, and the demonstration that she wears nothing but heavy makeup to bed), there is still more even more here about her broken heart.

Victor Mature, and his perpetual grimace, is the tough police detective whose beat is the Strip. We gather Jane was supposed to wait for him until he came back from the War, but didn’t. They are equally delighted and distressed to see each other again, and Mature becomes particularly bitter. He also reflects on his former self:

“That guy was a chump. He believed that if he left his hat or his girl at a table they’d be there when he got back.”

A couple of subplots on Mr. Mature’s side include the teenaged would-be bride and groom he has to hold in detention until the parents show up to stop the quickie wedding. There is also the playful antagonism with his boss, the sheriff played as his comic foil by Jay C. Flippen.

The Last Chance, where Jane used to sing during the War also keeps a couple of side stories on the back burner for us: Hoagy and his pal, played by Will Wright. Mr. Wright, the hangdog proprietor/house detective of other movies here plays a floorwalker who used own The Last Chance, but lost it in a bad business move. The stern new owner, played by Robert J. Wilke, comes down hard on his staff. Hoagy hates him, and Wright chokes on his humiliation.

Which is something we have to consider when this same new owner ends up dead.

Vincent Price has the most dramatic reason to kill him. Mr. Price is an embezzler, wanted back east, and takes his wife’s necklace to buy himself credit at the gaming tables. When he loses big at The Last Chance, Mr. Wilke takes no pity on him.

But what of Brad Dexter, perpetually tailing Miss Russell in and out of cocktail lounges and swimming pools? He turns out to be an insurance investigator, and maybe Jane and Vincent have something cooking between them to scam The City of Second Chances?

Lots of suspects, and an unresolved love story in the middle of them.

The movie is capped by a nifty chase scene between an old woody station wagon and a helicopter.

The car is not unlike the old woody rumbling through the Nevada desert in “Split Second” (1953) seen in this post, and another reminder of that film is the abandoned military installation where the final confrontation between helicopter and car occurs. I don’t know if any atomic testing went on here, too, but it’s deadly eerie.

Victor Mature is in the helicopter, which buzzes the car and follows it right through an empty hangar.  The murderer has taken a hostage, and tries to escape in a cat and mouse game with the dogged Mr. Mature, in an abandoned wooden control tower. There is no dialogue in this exciting scene, just the sound of footsteps, gunfire, and the howling wind from the desert. A tumbleweed rudely bounces off the head of a slain figure in the dust.

The crime story may have not a lot of depth to it, but at times this is a visually stunning film. Along with the desert, and miles of footage of Jane Russell, we get the obligatory shots of the neon casino signs embroidering the night sky: The Golden Nugget, The Pioneer Club, a montage of all the old casinos and hotels. The Thunderbird, the Flamingo. The sign at the Union Pacific station where Jane Russell and Vincent Price arrive in town, not to be outdone, tells us Las Vegas is the “streamlined city of the west.”

The movie ends on an upbeat note with another of Hoagy’s songs. Not very noir, but Vegas makes its own rules.

Come back for more Vegas and more songs on Thursday in “Meet Me in Las Vegas” with Dan Dailey as a most unlucky gambler, until he grasps the delicate hand of dancer Cyd Charisse.

Now Playing - Las Vegas Story - 1952

This ad for “The Las Vegas Story” (1952) is a bit different from the usual print ads we’ve shown here before in that it carries this sidebar of photos from the film along with the splashy artist’s rendering.

This was rising star Jane Russell’s sixth movie, and her attributes are displayed in the sketch like a trademark. Victor Mature and Vincent Price are her co-stars and the three create romantic triangle in what is also sort of a murder mystery and a musical. Hoagy Carmichael shows up, so it’s not your typical film noir. Just what this film is seems to depend on your viewpoint, and the ad, with both photos and sketch, likewise tries to cover all bases.

Best Years of Our Lives - PT 2

The minor actors in “The Best Years of Our Lives” tell us even more about the three veterans. Fred’s father, played by Roman Bohnen, has a very brief but exceptionally moving scene as he reads aloud his son’s war citations. Homer’s younger sister, not uncomfortable with his hooks, stares openly fascinated at them as children will. Ray Collins is both pompous and subtly sinister as Al’s hypocritical boss. Hoagy Carmichael plays the easygoing Uncle Butch, who gives Homer a sense of perspective.

It is left to the minor characters of Butch and Al’s son, Rob, to introduce the post-war world for us by discussing the atom bomb. The central characters are too preoccupied with jobs, and fitting into their families and fitting into their clothes to care about the new geopolitical realities. Rob refers to the recent enemy as “Japanese” with a delicacy that eludes his veteran father, who persists in referring to them as “Japs.”

Wyler, with subtle observation even manages to put a toe across Hollywood’s color bar by training the camera’s eye on the African-American ex-GI who waits to go home just as Al, Homer and Fred must wait at the ATC depot. A black soldier brings his family into Fred’s drug store and is seen buying candy for his two children. The man standing in line next to Fred at the unemployment office is an African-American. It is as if Wyler hints there is a parallel story here to the one of Al, Homer, and Fred, but we only get a peek.

Another legacy to us comes from the man with the flag pin on his lapel who challenges Homer to consider that a left-wing conspiracy brought the nation to war. Al, played by Oscar winner Fredric March, chides the stuffy bankers at his welcome home banquet of their suspicion of “do-gooders” and “radicals.” Today, these salvos between right and left have been diminished to a cliché about blue states and red states. We are a nation at war today, and many of us wear flag pins on our lapels, or magnetic ribbons on our cars, but the civilian population has not been called upon to make sacrifices. Only civilians who have loved ones in the military have made sacrifices. The rest are untouched, and uninvolved. It was not so in World War II.

More on "The Best Years" tomorrow.