Authors: Emily W. Leider
In return for accepting a small part, Goldwyn offered to pay Myrna $100,000 for her appearance as Milly Stephenson and to give her top billing. Her contract with Goldwyn specifies, “The name of no other member of the cast may precede the Artist’s name, nor be displayed in type larger than that used to display Artist’s name.”
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The Best Years of Our Lives
tells the parallel stories of three veterans who have met for the first time inside the cabin of a cramped B-17 plane flying them home to Boone City, a stand-in for Cincinnati. As they peer through the Plexiglas nose cone to view the farmland below, each vet admits to a case of the jitters. Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), a decorated bombardier, was a soda jerk before the war and will be looking for work. He hardly knew his cover-girl-pretty wife Marie (Virginia Mayo) before they got married in a hurry during his basic training, and he doesn’t know what to expect from her. Homer Parrish, a sailor portrayed by double amputee Harold Russell, a nonprofessional who had served in the army, uses prosthetic metal hooks as substitutes for his burned hands. Despite his deft manipulation of the hooks, he dreads his first encounter with his family and high school sweetheart, Wilma (Cathy O’Donnell), who live on a leafy street of modest middle-class homes. Al Stephenson isn’t particularly eager to return to his old banker job and worries that after four years of separation, his son, daughter, and wife will consider him a stranger. He’s older and wealthier than his two new buddies but just as scared. By placing the action in the “average” Midwest and offering a cross-section of social classes, the script strove to tell the story of the American Everyman.
Each of the protagonists has to figure out who he is. Fred doesn’t know whether he’s a war hero or a nobody. When he shows up in civilian clothes instead of his showy air force officer’s uniform, decorated with medals, his wife, Marie, greets him with taunts. Reminders of past selves keep surfacing. Fred suffers flashbacks of himself piloting a bomber under fire. Homer studies photographs in his bedroom, showing him as a high school athlete with two good arms and hands. Al contemplates a framed portrait of himself and examines his own face in a bedroom mirror, uncertain about exactly whom he’s looking at.
Milly Stephenson resembles Nora Charles in some ways. Both are upbeat and game, and both have husbands who drink too much. But where Nora epitomized breezy, aristocratic, and elegant Manhattan wifehood freed from domestic drudgery, Milly is entrenched in a small city’s respectable and homey upper-middle-class routines. She’s emotionally direct, not flippant. On her own she has been running a household in an upscale apartment building and has held together her diminished family of three. She feels comfortable in the apron she wears when we first see her.
In the famous homecoming scene Milly is in the background, setting out three supper plates on a small terrace. She and Al have been married for twenty years, but she still “looks young and alluring and very much alive,” as Sherwood presents her. From someplace out of the frame, she calls out, “Who’s that at the door?” when she hears the doorbell ring. We see Al (in uniform) from the back, framed by the doorway, as he makes his way down a long corridor to be greeted by Milly’s outstretched arms. Al has hushed his two children by covering their mouths with his hands, not wanting them to announce his arrival and spoil the surprise. But Milly has guessed that he’s back. After tongue-tied moments and their first ardent embrace, she registers both joy and uncertainty. “I look terrible,” she finally says, her voice breaking. “Who says so?” Al answers. His choppy movements and darting eyes convey his own edginess and self-doubt. Seated, he takes out a cigarette and offers one to Milly. He’s forgotten that she doesn’t smoke.
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Ill at ease in an apartment where he feels more like a guest than a member of the household, Al suggests a night on the town with Milly and their daughter, Peggy. At a local bar owned by Homer’s uncle Butch (Hoagy Carmichael), he bumps into the two veterans he met earlier in the day. Both Al and Fred proceed to get so drunk they can’t walk on their own steam. Milly and Peggy have to practically carry them into the car, which Peggy drives. Back in the Stephenson apartment, where Fred is spending the night, the men have to be put to bed like young children. Peggy removes Fred’s shoes and loosens his belt before settling him into her bed with its incongruous frilly canopy. She will sleep on the living-room couch. In the course of the night she will come in to comfort him when a nightmare flashback to a burning B-17 torments his sleep. Milly, in the master bedroom (furnished, over Joseph Breen’s objections, with a double bed), has to coax Al into his pajamas and turn him onto his stomach to prevent his snoring. Milly and Peggy are the competent, take-charge maternal figures. The men they tend, Al and Fred, are passive and dependent, as is Homer when, in his own bedroom scene, he shows Wilma how helpless he is without the harness that attaches his hooks to his arms.
Each of the three returning soldiers will see his manhood restored to some degree in the course of the movie. After losing a drugstore soda fountain job because he punched a belligerent customer who questioned America’s justification for fighting World War II, Fred Derry will at last find work salvaging parts of junked airplanes. Divorced from his shallow and unfaithful wife, he is free to start over with Peggy Stephenson, with whom he’s fallen in love. Al, recovered from his hangover, reclaims the passion in his marriage, seizing Milly in his arms when she enters their bedroom with a breakfast tray, which he puts aside. The dissolve clues us that they are making love. He later asserts himself at work, persuading the bank president to take risks on loans to veterans who lack collateral. And Homer accepts Wilma’s love and ability to see beyond his disability. Their wedding at Wilma’s home concludes the movie. As Homer and Wilma recite their vows, Milly stands at the center of the background, flanked by Al and Peggy.
Although central, the marital relationship between Al and Milly shows signs of strain and resists being idealized. They fall into step on the dance floor in an improvised scene at Butch’s bar, but Al is so drunk he thinks she’s someone else. “You remind me of my wife,” he says. Al’s drinking puts Milly on edge. She counts the number of drinks he’s downed at the bank dinner, where Al just misses making a fool of himself, delivering a rambling after-dinner speech. In a late-night confrontation with their overwrought daughter, who has announced she’s determined to break up Fred’s failed marriage to Marie, Peggy reveals how little she knows about her parents’ story. She insists that Al and Milly can’t possibly understand her heartbreak over being in love with the married Fred, because according to her they have no experience of struggle; they’ve always had things perfect: “You loved each other, and you got married in a big church” and honeymooned in the South of France. Milly assures her that she’s mistaken. Looking directly at Al, she says, “How many times have I told you that I hated you—and believed it, in my heart? How many times have you said that you’re sick and tired of me—that we’re all washed up? How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?” This is Myrna Loy’s moment to shine. Her intimate, unguarded tone cuts to the core and is deeply moving. We feel the “powerful yet quiet femininity” Teresa Wright discerned in her. “It’s so inner” and sensual (
BB
, 199). For Wright, Al and Milly became, via March and Loy, the gold standard for depictions of married love on the screen.
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The rapport that developed between Wyler and Myrna Loy astonished Myrna and made for one of the peaks of her professional career. Fredric March told her, “I can’t believe the radar you two have going. You don’t even need to talk.” When she substituted a gesture for a line, or in one instance sensed that a bit of dialogue didn’t work and should be cut, Wyler allowed her instincts to prevail and thanked her for helping him. He said that because Myrna Loy played it, the role of Milly Stephenson became bigger than it seemed in the script (
BB
, 198). The two retained the warmest feelings for each other. The
Los Angeles Times
film critic Kevin Thomas remembers seeing them meet unexpectedly at a big party and fall into a spontaneous embrace.
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Wyler put a great deal of himself into this movie. As an air force officer who took a handheld camera onto B-17 and B-25 flights in order to film documentaries during the war, he had suffered hearing loss so profound that he questioned whether he would ever be able to resume directing. On the set of
Best Years
he discovered that he could hear the actors by attaching a headset and amplifiers to the sound equipment. He identified with Russell’s disability, likening his enhanced headset to Russell’s hooks.
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The homecoming scene also had autobiographical resonance for Wyler. On leave from the air force, he’d reunited with his wife, Talli, at the Plaza Hotel in New York. She remembered standing in the doorway at the end of a long hall, “and he came down the hall toward me. That’s how the scene in the picture came about.”
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The pared-down documentary style Wyler used in his air force films
Memphis Belle
and
Thunderbolt
infuses
The Best Years of Our Lives
, his first postwar feature. Teresa Wright recalled, “Willy Wyler and Toland wanted it
[Best Years]
to have the look of an American newsreel. They wanted it to have the feel of a live newspaper article.” Working with Toland in their sixth collaboration, Wyler cut down the number of shots in the movie to a minimum, using fewer than two hundred, compared to three to four hundred shots per hour in the average film. His goal was to both clarify and simplify. In a celebrated essay first published in 1948, André Bazin called this “stripping away.” He hailed
The Best Years of Our Lives
as the proving ground for Wyler’s “invisible” and democratic style, which allows the viewer to decide which of several actions that occur simultaneously to follow. “Thanks to depth of field, . . . the viewer is given the opportunity to edit the scene himself.”
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Although Bosley Crowther of the
New York Times
endorsed it “not only as superlative entertainment but as food for quiet and humanizing thought,” not every critic applauded
Best Years
. Writing in the
New Republic
, Manny Farber called it “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz.” Farber thought the movie pulled its punches and “never has sufficient nerve to hit hard-headed business, or toadying clerks as well as it would like.” But he commended it as “an extremely sensitive and poignant study of life like your own.”
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James Agee devoted two long essays in
The Nation
to
Best Years
. Like Farber he found the picture too timid in its social criticism, and he remained unconvinced that three veterans from such different backgrounds would ever mingle with social ease once they returned to civilian life. Despite these reservations, however, he praised the “force, beauty and simplicity” of many scenes and likened Toland’s cinematography, in its honesty and feeling for people, to the photographs of Walker Evans. Wyler simply bowled him over. Always a good director, in Agee’s eyes “he now seems one of the few great ones. He has come back from the war with a style of great purity, directness, and warmth.”
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The Best Years of Our Lives
, which cost $2.1 million to make, earned $11 million in the United States and Canada within a few years, out grossing
Gone with the Wind
. It swept the Academy Awards, taking home Oscars for Best Picture (other contenders were
Henry V, It’s a Wonderful Life, The Razor’s Edge
, and
The Yearling
), Actor, Supporting Actor, Director, Screenplay, Music Score, and Film Editing, plus an honorary award to Harold Russell. The outstanding performances of Myrna Loy and Dana Andrews went unrecognized by the Academy, as did, shamefully, the cinematography of Gregg Toland. At the Brussels World Film Festival in June 1947, however, Myrna Loy was chosen Best Actress of the year; at the same time Gérard Philippe was picked as Best Actor for his work in
Diable au corps
. Myrna went to Brussels to personally accept her award from the prince regent of Belgium.
True to their tradition of conflict, Wyler and Goldwyn, who would never again work together, finished off their years of partnership with a long legal battle. According to his contract, Wyler was supposed to receive 20 percent of the profits for
The Best Years of Our Lives
. He claimed in a 1958 lawsuit that Goldwyn had underreported profits for the first four years after the picture’s release, by $2 million, and that Goldwyn owed him $408,356. They settled out of court when Wyler agreed to accept a payment of $80,000.
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In private life Myrna rejoined the ranks of the married when she became Mrs. Gene Markey early in 1946. The ceremony in the chapel of Roosevelt Navy Base, at Terminal Island, San Pedro, might have been titled “Here Comes the Groom.” It was all about Gene Markey, who on his wedding day sported navy dress blues with the wide gold commodore’s band on his sleeve, and on his chest displayed the Bronze Star he’d won for leading a reconnaissance mission in the Solomon Islands. He had served in the Pacific on the staff of Admiral William F. “Bull” Halsey’s Third Fleet, and because Gene wanted Admiral Halsey as his best man, the date of the wedding was chosen to accommodate Halsey’s schedule. Halsey would be in the Los Angeles area to lead the Tournament of Roses parade, so an early January date was chosen. Gene also wanted his old sailing and drinking buddy, John Ford, who became a navy captain during the war and had reconnected with Markey during service in New Delhi, to participate in the wedding party. Ford, who had directed Myrna in
The Black Watch
and
Arrowsmith
but had seen little of her since, gave the bride away. Myrna didn’t even know he would escort her down the aisle until the day of the wedding. Natalie Visart Taylor designed her blue suit and matching hat with violet veiling to match the bouquet of violets she carried.