Review – The Best Years of Our Lives

More than six decades later this tale of three vets home from the war is powerful stuff, so I can only imagine the impact it must have had back in 1946. Fredric March, Dana Andrews and Harold Russel play three guys having varying degrees of trouble readjusting to civilian life. March resumes his everyday job at a bank and suffers from what nowadays would be diagnosed as minor depression complicated by alcoholism. Andrews battles nightmares, swallows enough of his pride to go from Air Force officer to drug store counter help, and falls out of love with his wife and in love with March’s daughter. But Russel outshines them both as a former sailor learning to live without hands. Russel was an actual disabled vet facing the same challenges as his character, and his lack of slick Hollywood pedigree helped him bring an impressive honesty to the role. Despite a touch of the melodrama typical for the time, this still stands as one of the best movies ever made about the difficulties service members can face. Worth seeing