US 172m Dir: William Wyler
Based on: Glory For Me by MacKinlay Kantor (Novella)
I knew nothing about this film and was blown away by how brilliant it is.
Three veterans return to the US after the war but have difficulty settling back into their lives. Air Force Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) suffers from PTSD and returns to find he can't get a good job and has poor relations with his wife. Sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March) struggles to return home and to the world of banking and then has struggles with alcohol. Sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) has lost both hands during the war and struggles to deal with a new life with mechanical hooks and the way people treat him because of it.
The whole topic of the film is not one you would expect to be made in the immediate aftermath of the war. It shows us an America that veterans really struggled to settle back into. The three men are all pretty heroic in their own way but none of them consider themselves that way. At no point are any events from the war shown and there's a general sense that these men wish they had never been involved.
The film is really cleverly written, telling these three interwoven stories excellently. It's great that the three characters are of different ranks, from different services and of different classes but the war has ripped their world apart in one way or another. The direction is also really clever, especially when two or more of the leads are together, as the camerawork always slyly shows you which is the most important plot point happening at the time.
The case are wonderful here. Dana Andrews and Fredric March are really successful in making their characters really likable yet totally broken and sometimes behaving quite poorly at the same time. Harold Russell is a revelation as sailor Homer- Russell was an actual veteran who appeared in a short documentary who did indeed lose his hands in the war. He delivers a great performance, to the point it won him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. The scenes he shares with Wilma (Cathy O'Donnell) are so heartfelt and beautiful. Indeed, O'Donnell and Teresa Wright as Peggy Stephenson are both also superb as the female leads, feeling like much more than simply generic love interests.
The film is so impressive that it manages to raise the issue of veterans struggling after the war, produces huge levels of emotion and somehow not just feel preachy and misery. It's often funny and it's always entertaining. At nearly three hours it's a long film and I hadn't intended to watch it in one sitting but it's so brilliant the runtime doesn't drag at all.
A masterpiece and one of the best films I've seen in a long while. Beautiful, gut-wrenching and entertaining all at once.
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