The Best Years of Our Lives

By the time [the three servicemen] are saying goodbye to each other, all I was thinking about was how I hope they reunite... and being elated that they do.

It's too schematic and it drags on after you get the points. However, episodes and details stand out and help to compensate for the soggy plot strands, and there's something absorbing about the banality of its large-scale good intentions.

The Best Years Of Our Lives is an eloquent tribute to returned veterans [and] a magnificent, brilliant contribution to motion pictures as an art.

Every member of the cast Is so much like some one you know, every one so natural and likable, as real and pathetic as any human being close to your heart, but Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell give faultless performances.

The playing is magnificent -- especially that of Fredric March.

It has everything it should have -- a literate and often sharp and honest script by Robert E. Sherwood, supple direction by William Wyler, and is ingratiatingly played by at least one actor -- Frederic March.

Perhaps no film detailed the struggles of our heroes returning home from battle as well. Its groundbreakingly authentic views were bolstered by Harold Russell’s visceral and tender-hearted performance.

On the surface, the tale seems easy-going and loosely knit. But it is compounded of an abundance of illuminating detail. The characters are of more than one dimension.

It has something to say to a dozen other publics... What I regret is that Sherwood, Wyler and Goldwyn should have preferred to say it in such naïve, really such rock-bottom terms.

Nonetheless, these reservations are not intended to diminish the eminent merits of The Best Years of Our Lives, in which the mastery of one of the world's greatest directors is ever on display.