The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)

Sponsored by TOSDV - 80th Anniversary Screening

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About

“The best American movie about returning soldiers I’ve ever seen—the most moving and the most deeply felt. It bears witness to its times and contemporaries like few other Hollywood features, and Gregg Toland’s deep-focus cinematography is one of the best things he ever did.” — Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

“It feels surprisingly modern: lean, direct, honest about issues that Hollywood then studiously avoided. After the war years of patriotism and heroism in the movies, this was a sobering look at the problems veterans faced when they returned home.” — Roger Ebert.

SYNOPSIS

Director William Wyler and producer Samuel Goldwyn struck Oscar gold with this landmark postwar drama, following three veterans as they return home from World War II and struggle to reconnect with their families, careers, and a society transformed by conflict. Eschewing triumphalism for a sober reckoning with the psychological and social costs of war, Wyler brings extraordinary compassion to questions of reintegration, disability, marriage, and economic uncertainty. Anchored by a remarkable ensemble cast, The Best Years of Our Lives remains one of Hollywood’s most moving portraits of ordinary people navigating the difficult transition from war to peace. Ace cinematographer Gregg Toland (Citizen Kane) brought his celebrated deep-focus technique to the production, and the visual partnership between Toland and Wyler produced some of the most eloquent staging in Classical Hollywood cinema, including a famous sequence in which Dana Andrews places a life-altering phone call while Fredric March and others gather around a piano, their emotional distance rendered palpable through the juxtaposition of foreground and background action.

Organist Ian Fraser will perform on the Wurlitzer for an hour preceding the screening.