The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
Directed by William Wyler
It's the hope that sustains the spirit of every GI: the dream of the day when he will finally return home. For three WWII veterans, the day has arrived. But for each man, the dream is about to become a nightmare.
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He also sets a tempo markedly slower than Michael Bay's, suggesting an affinity with more old-fashioned Hollywood entertainment (the first half hour even references The Best Years of Our Lives and Jerry Lewis's The Bellboy).
I was even able to maintain my composure, just barely, when the double-amputee ex-Army hero played by Iraq vet Gregory D. Gadson —shades of Harold Russell in The Best Years of Our Lives—got his wish to play soldier again.
Meanwhile, we get scenes of the girlfriend, a scientist (Hamish Linklater), and a wounded army vet with prosthetic legs (Gregory D. Gadson, who, in a tip of the hat to “The Best Years of Our Lives,” is the real thing), trying to sabotage the aliens’ communications.
The urtext here is, of course, William Wyler’s The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), a story of three WWII veterans and their difficult transition into civilian life.
Starring Robert De Niro, Christopher Walken, John Savage and John Cazale, this is a modern version of the Second World War drama The Best Years of Our Lives, showing how men and America itself cope with the horrors of war and its aftermath.
Yet The Deer Hunter is less a realist war film than a vision of how small-town American life was twisted and warped by Vietnam – a high-octane sequel to The Best Years of Our Lives that follows three steelworkers, Michael (Robert De Niro), Nicky (Christopher Walken) and Steven (John Savage) as they move from their hometown of Clairton, Pennsylvania (in the first act) to Vietnam (in the second act) and back again to Clairton (in the third act).
It is a film about the trauma of war, more in the tradition of "The Best Years of Our Lives" and "Coming Home."
Released during a time when films were seriously vying for attention against television, Giant stands apart from the other consequences of dire studio measures besides gargantuan length (widescreen, quadraphonic sound, more location work) by devoting its two-hundred-and-one minutes not to religion (The Ten Commandments, also 1956) or war (The Bridge on the River Kwai) but to the lives of an extended family--an ensemble ethic that had gradually fallen out of vogue following 1946's The Best Years of Our Lives.
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Film has often dealt with trauma, even before the classification of PTSD, with titles like “The Best Years of Our Lives.”
Movies from The Best Years of Our Lives to The Manchurian Candidate to The Deer Hunter have explored the returning veteran’s experience, sometimes envisioning the prodigal warrior as a hero, sometimes as a casualty, and sometimes as a threat.
And if every generation gets the ''Apocalypse Now'' -- and ''The Best Years of Our Lives'' -- it needs, then the generation defined by 9/11/01 is seeing a very different Black Hawk Down from the one it might have seen on 9/10/01.
When Wyler was behind the camera for serious Oscar contenders like Wuthering Heights (1939), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) or Ben-Hur (1959), he was fine.
Written by one of Hollywood’s greatest screenwriters, the then-blacklisted Dalton Trumbo (“Spartacus,” “Johnny Got His Gun”), and directed by the great but perpetually underrated William Wyler (“The Best Years of Our Lives,” “Ben Hur”), “Roman Holiday” fits both talents because, for a sweet little comedic love story, it’s relatively dark stuff.