New Picture

The Best Years of Our Lives (Goldwyn-RKO Radio) gives Hollywood its cleanest fall, to date, in its wrestle with postwar problems. It is a big (2 hr. 45 min.), shiny, star-studded show that should appeal to practically anyone who can be lured inside a movie theater. Producer Goldwyn, cheerfully shooting the works on as glittery a collection of scripting, directing, acting and technical talents as $3 million could buy, has bought himself a sure-fire hit--with a little to spare. Like most good mass entertainments, this picture has occasional moments of knowing hokum; but unlike most sure-fire movies, it was put together with good taste, honesty, wit--and even a strong suggestion of guts.

The whole idea began (according to Goldwyn pressagents) when the producer ran across a cut and a story in TIME (Aug. 7, 1944). The picture showed a group of homecoming marines leaning out the windows of a train coach on which had been chalked "Home Again!" The news story suggested that the boys might be returning to their families and jobs with mixed emotions.

With that intuitive flash which frequently strikes cinemagnates, Goldwyn snatched up the phone, called Palm Beach and asked Novelist MacKinlay Kantor to dash off a story treatment. Kantor went right to work, but before he was through, his "treatment" had blossomed into a 268-page novel in free verse (Glory for Me, a Literary Guild dividend selection). Playwright Robert E. Sherwood, whose knack for smooth, talkable prose has won him three Pulitzer Prizes and a place in the history books as the writer of Franklin Roosevelt's war speeches, was hired to do the script. The story was one which appealed to able Director William Wyler (Wuthering Heights, The Memphis Belle), who confesses that his 3 1/2 years in the Air Forces gave him a few personal reconversion problems of his own.

The cast that acts out the story is just about right. Dana Andrews is a bombardier captain who has lost his taste for both his soda-jerking job and his pretty, addle-pated wife (Virginia Mayo). Fredric March, after a stretch as a middle-aged infantry sergeant, now sees his stuffy bank job in a new perspective. Made shy by a long-deferred reunion with his wife (Myrna Loy) and grown-up daughter (Teresa Wright), March goes on one of the funniest benders ever filmed.

Most notable performance (and the one which best shows off Director Wyler's skill) is given by ex-Paratrooper Harold Russell, 32. Cast as a handicapped sailor named Homer Parrish, Russell actually plays himself. He is no actor and no one pretends that he is, but his performance is more affecting than any professional's could be. Director Wyler merely surrounded Russell with plot and let the cameraman follow the calm, strong, unhandsome Russell face. The audience fills in all the emotion that is needed as the unembarrassed camera studies the two skillfully articulated metal hooks that Russell has learned to use in place of the hands that were blown off on Dday.

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