The Favorites - The Best Years of Our Lives (#64)

The Favorites is a series briefly exploring films I love, to find out what makes them - and me - tick. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946/USA/dir. William Wyler) appeared at #64 on my original list.

What it is • The war is over...the big one, the one that galvanized the country and affected every life, at home or abroad. Of course it didn't have the same effect across the board. Some, like soldier Al Stephenson (Fredric March), sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), and airman Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), experienced the battlefield for themselves and are returning with wounds psychic (in Fred's case) or physical (in Homer's - he is played by a real-life double amputee). Others, like Al's wife Milly (Myrna Loy) and daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright), experienced its shocks more indirectly, through the absence of their loved ones and more subtle social and economic changes on the homefront. And still others, like Al's banker boss Mr. Milton (Ray Collins) or the right-wing isolationist who gets in a fight with two of the veterans at a soda fountain, barely seem to have been affected by it at all except as an abstraction or an imposition. This diversity of experience is one of the brilliant qualities of The Best Years of Our Lives, which centers around the three veterans (attempting) to adjust to their old lives, only to discover that those lives don't exist anymore. It doesn't simply offer one prepackaged notion of how the war impacted America and the individuals in this story; it explores many different points of impact with rapt fascination. In telling this story, William Wyler's attention to detail and Gregg Toland's astonishing deep-focus camerawork create a world so textured that after nearly three hours we feel as if we live there ourselves.

Why I like it •

Ben-Hur

Around 1991, when I kicked off ;my video collection in earnest (the few kids' films I owned up to that point didn't really count towards a self-conscious canon), Ben-Hur was one of the first VHS tapes I purchased - or that my father purchased for me anyway; at 7, I didn't have much in the way of a disposable income. I remember seeing the case in a video store somewhere in Boston - around Easter, I think. I was impressed by the grandeur of that iconic poster on the cover, with the title chiseled out of the hard rock of a canyon face, against which a Roman statue leaned while tiny chariots raced around the huge letters. I was spurred on too by the bulk of the video package - remember that at this time, long films got two cassettes, creating a hefty physical size to match the scope of the movie within.

Remembering the Movies, Nov. 19 - 25

Every Friday, we look back at films released 10-100 years ago this week.

Today marks the debut of a new format for Remembering the Movies. As promised, the focus is on the visuals - bigger pictures and posters, and more of them. There will also be some embedded videos instead of links, while extensive quotations, highlighted in red, are replacing my usual write-ups (usually the quotes will be from contemporaneous reviews or published histories; this week, for whatever reason, they are mostly from film blogs). There's one exception to the outside references: each week I will provide a capsule review of one of the films discussed. This week it's the novelty release Just Imagine (1930), which perfectly suits our theme of traveling through time in ten-year increments. Just Imagine is a sci-fi projection of what the world will look like in the remote, distant future (i.e. the year 1980). Meanwhile, the image above comes from Heaven's Gate, the much-maligned and lately championed epic from the actual year 1980. An early Fenimore Cooper adaptation, a buddy/kid comedy, a Bette Davis classic, and an Irish silent join Cimino's folly below. If you want to learn more about any of these movies, click on the hyperlinked title after the entry; it will take you to IMDb for further explorations.