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This 1946 film won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director (William Wyler) and Best Actor (Fredrick March). It is almost three hours long, rare for its time, but one's interest in the characters and story never flags. The movie is a view of victorious war time America coming to grips with a peacetime economy as seen through the eyes of three returning veterans: a severely disabled sailor, a sergeant with a loving wife but rebellious children, and a Captain whose wife was and is cheating on hime (he later gets involved with the sergeant's daughter). Parts of this are extremely moving, parts are downright Capra-esque.The wonderful opening has the three protagonists hitching a ride in the nose cone of a B-17 headed for the scrap pile near their home town. In doing so the plane flies low over most of the country as if to show us that we're all in this togther.
Follow Ups:
...if I got the facts correct, Harold Russell (the real veteran who lost his hands) won the Best Supporting Oscar and made news a few years ago by selling his statue for $60,000 because he needed the money.
I believe he won two Oscars, one as you say for Best Supporting Actor and another one especially created for him.He was also in "Barfly" with Mickey Rourke.
A very solid and a good film.
I like it much.
When I was researching the WWII aircraft boneyards and salvage operations for a project, I learned that TBYooL had some compelling scenes involving this little known element of the war. So I saw this recently for the first time. It was a hard rental to find. Netflix has it.I was pleased to see that the aircraft graveyards were used as a metaphor for the used up veterans returning to an America that had gotten along fine for 4 years without them. The men were as disposable as the equipment. The Dana Andrews character is SO disillusioned and lost. He left as a boy and returned a man, but society wanted him to go back to a boys job and life because that's all it had for him. The guy that lost his arms had an amazingly positive attitude with a sad undercurrent of loss of what he could have been and the feelings of being half a man. The fact that he was a non-actor vet that HAD lost his arms in the war only made this that much harder to watch.
The whole concept of the film rang true for me and can very easily be put into the context of today. It's a classic anti-war/vet story and I was frankly stunned that there was a movie like this made right after WWII. And that it (deservedly) swept the Oscars that year. By far, Dana Andrews best movie.
It was remade as a VERY forgettable TV movie in the late eighties or early nineties.Agree on Andrews. I liked the way the romance between him and the daughter developed.
The film is moving in parts, yes. It is also reminiscent of Erich Maria Remark's novels - most likely these served as its inspiration.
Producer Samuel Goldwyn had been beaten out of a couple of Best Picture awards so this one was very meaningful to him. The idea had come from his wife from a human interest srory she had read. Goldwyn never gave her any credit and she took her resentment to her grave.
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