8.4 | / 10 |
Users | 4.5 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Three returning servicemen fight to adjust to life after World War II.
Starring: Myrna Loy, Fredric March, Dana Andrews, Teresa Wright, Virginia MayoRomance | 100% |
Drama | 96% |
War | 40% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
English SDH, French, Spanish
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region free
Movie | 5.0 | |
Video | 4.5 | |
Audio | 4.0 | |
Extras | 1.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
After winning the Best Director Oscar for Mrs. Miniver, Oscar's Best Picture of 1942, William Wyler took his own patriotic suggestion woven throughout that film and joined the Allied war effort. He served as an officer in the U.S. Army Air Corps, applying his talents to military documentaries supporting the war. One of them, The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress, cost Wyler much of his hearing from flak concussions during aerial shooting over Germany. Wyler's first Hollywood feature after the war won him his second directing Oscar and was named Best Picture of 1946. The Best Years of Our Lives is the logical bookend to Mrs. Miniver, because it's about three American fighting men who have survived the battle, won the war and now have to face the years ahead. As he did often in his career, Wyler drew a practical template that later films about returning veterans would imitate. He had the advantage of working with a war that nearly everyone agreed was necessary and just ("nearly", because even in 1947 there were voices urging that the alliance with Stalin's Russia against the Nazis was a mistake, and one such character makes a memorable appearance in the film). But Wyler, who had grasped the dire urgency of the Nazi threat early on, was too much of a realist to ignore the human costs imposed by vanquishing such an enemy. He'd seen soldiers and pilots die in combat. He'd even lost a man under his command—and they were only making documentaries. On his return home, Wyler himself experienced the sense of dislocation and unfamiliarity so powerfully captured in Best Years. To give credit where credit is due, the script for Best Years was developed by producer Samuel Goldwyn, with whom Wyler's long and contentious working relationship ended with this film. Goldwyn commissioned war correspondent and novelist MacKinlay Kantor to write a screenplay, but Kantor ended up producing a novel in blank verse, which was published under the title Glory to Me. Robert E. Sherwood (The Petrified Forest) adapted Kantor's work for the screen. Wyler made additional revisions so that he could cast a non-professional actor named Harold Russell, whom he'd seen in an Army film called Diary of a Sergeant about the rehabilitation of injured war veterans. Russell would eventually make Oscar history as the only person ever to win two Academy Awards for the same role: one as Best Supporting Actor and an honorary Oscar for "bringing hope and courage to his fellow veterans".
The cinematographer for The Best Years of Our Lives was Gregg Toland, famous as Orson Welles's collaborator on Citizen Kane, whom Wyler called "a great and happy influence on my work". Some have suggested that it was Wyler who pioneered the technique of "deep focus" photography often credited to Toland and Welles, but it's probably more accurate to say that all three shared the same dramatic impulse to show an audience multiple characters in sharp focus, acting and reacting in different planes within the same frame. The result helps create an illusion of depth. It also, as Wyler pointed out, lets the audience "do its own cutting" by choosing where to look—and makes the close-up more powerful, when it's used. In Virginia Mayo's introduction (listed below under "Special Features"), she refers to the "restoration" of Best Years, but that interview dates back at least fifteen years. No information was available about additional restoration efforts for this new Blu-ray (presented, as per Warner's usual standard in 1080p with AVC encoding), but the results are impressive. Blacks are solid, contrast is appropriately set, and shades of gray are finely delineated. The source material is in excellent shape (or has been well restored) so that there are no specks, scratches or dust. Only an occasional jump indicates a missing frame. Sharpness and detail are somewhat inconsistent. Most of the film is nicely detailed, but some scenes are noticeably softer. There does not seem to be any particular pattern to which scenes are softer; this is certainly not a case where the variation can be explained by the presence of opticals. For example, when Derry walks through the field of airplane scrap, the scene is noticeably less sharp until Derry reaches the bomber where he pauses and climbs into the cockpit; then the detail immediately improves. Some of the early scenes, especially those involving Fredric March and Myrna Loy are notably less detailed than their later scenes, for no obvious reason. Some of the inconsistencies may be inherent to the original photography, while others may be a result of the restoration process. As we know from other restorations performed for Blu-ray, if portions of Best Years had to be supplied from sources of lesser quality, even the most skilled digital massaging could not completely disguise variations in quality. However, without definitive information from the technical crew, it is impossible to know for sure. What can be observed is that the film's grain structure appears to be natural and unfiltered, that the softness is specific to individual scenes and that care seems to have been taken in creating smooth transitions between sequences. Whatever inconsistencies may exist in the source material, they have been handled with care. With scant extras, this nearly three-hour film has an average bitrate of 25.96 Mbps, which has proven adequate for major actions films, let alone a black-and-white drama. Compression artifacts are not an issue. The Best Years of Our Lives has been translated beautifully to Blu-ray.
I have seen references to a stereo mix for the Westrex system, but they are either a mistake or that mix did not survive. The film's original mono mix is presented as lossless DTS-HD MA 1.0, and it is about what one would expect for a well-preserved dramatic film of the era. The voices are clearly reproduced, and the sound effects are natural and well-mixed. Wyler was reportedly not pleased with Hugo Friedhofer's score, even though it won one of the film's seven Oscars, but Friedhofer was producer Goldwyn's pick. There are certainly moments in the film when one might wish for a less sentimental musical accompaniment, but I suspect that Friedhofer's more traditional approach was a major factor in the film's popular appeal. The orchestra doesn't have the clarity or dynamic range of a contemporary recording, but the quality of the Blu-ray track is appropriate to the period.
The Best Years of Our Lives has had several DVD versions. HBO issued the film on DVD in 1998 with the same collection of extras included here. Three years later, MGM released a separate edition with no extras except a trailer (and, as was MGM's habit in those years, a "collectible booklet"). No new extras have been created for the Blu-ray.
The Best Years of Our Lives was a huge box office success when it was released in November 1946, at a time when the events it depicted were still playing out across the country. Probably no one would have predicted that it would still remain as current as it has. Early in the film, Al Stephenson's son, Rob, tells his newly returned father that one of his teachers says there won't be any more wars, because the risk of annihilation is too great in the nuclear age. That was certainly the thinking for some years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but with the beginning of the Korean War in 1950, the understanding began to shift. Today, after Vietnam, two wars in Iraq and one in Afghanistan (just to name the major U.S. conflicts), we know that the advent of nuclear weapons did not render conventional warfare obsolete, and neither did automation. The issues explored in The Best Years of Our Lives may now play themselves out in a world transformed by technology, social changes, and economic shifts, but their human dimensions remain fundamentally the same. Wyler and his superb cast captured these tensions in a drama that still resonates. Highly recommended.
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