The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) on Netflix
Approved19462h 50mDramaRomanceWar
Three World War II veterans fly home to Boone City: banker Al Stephenson, soda jerk Fred Derry, and Homer Parrish, who lost both hands in the Navy. Homer pulls away from Wilma.
- Netflix3.9/5
- IMDb8.1/1077,168 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Just out of World War II, three servicemen fly together to Boone City and become friends. Al Stephenson is a bank executive who served as an Army sergeant in the Pacific. Fred Derry, a captain who flew bombardier missions over Europe, worked behind a drugstore counter before the war. Homer Parrish, a Navy sailor whose ship was sunk, lost both hands below the elbow and now uses metal hooks. Al comes home to his wife Milly and their daughter Peggy. Fred cannot find his wife Marie, who has taken a night job at a nightclub. Homer, once a star athlete, keeps away from his family and from Wilma, the neighbor he meant to marry, certain that his hooks make people uneasy. Al is put in charge of loans to veterans.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- For playing Parrish, non-professional actor Russell won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar, but the Academy had already given him an honorary Oscar because it assumed he had little chance to win; it remains the only time two Oscars were awarded for the same performance.
- Because of the distribution arrangement RKO had with Goldwyn, RKO recorded a loss of $660,000 on the film.
- Wyler changed the original casting, which had featured a veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder, and chose non-actor Harold Russell to play Homer Parrish.
- For The Best Years of Our Lives, Wyler asked the principal actors to buy their own clothes to connect with daily life, and he built life-size sets instead of the larger sets normally used for camera positions.
- The scene of Derry walking among aircraft ruins was filmed at Ontario Army Air Field, a former training facility converted into a scrap yard holding nearly 2,000 disassembled combat aircraft.
- Cinematographer Gregg Toland used deep focus photography, keeping objects both close to and distant from the camera in sharp focus, and Wyler used 'zoom' effects to simulate Fred Derry's subjective state while reliving a combat mission.
- Samuel Goldwyn was inspired to make the film after reading an August 7, 1944, Time article about the difficulties men faced returning to civilian life.
- In 1989, The Best Years of Our Lives was one of the first 25 films selected by the Library of Congress for preservation in the National Film Registry for being culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
