The Best Years of Our Lives is perhaps one of the biggest and most important movies of all time, and yet I hardly see it get talked about anymore. It’s a movie that’s gotten very high scores from both critics and audiences over the years. It won seven categories at the Oscars in 1947, including Best Picture. It is also has one of the highest box office returns of all time, being one of the top 10 highest-grossing movies before 1950, and still being one of the top 100 highest-grossing movies of all time when adjusted for inflation. Aside from all of the numbers, this is also just an important movie, featuring a much-needed story being told at the time that it came out.

See, in the early 1940s there was this little event that happened called World War II. You may have heard of it. Coming pretty soon off the heels of the end of World War II, The Best Years of Our Lives tells the story of three men who are returning home after the war and are having trouble re-adjusting to civilian life. Our three protagonists are Al, Fred, and Homer. Al has a wife of 20 years and two children, and he has trouble going back into the normalcy and everyday life that domesticity offered. He’s initially a little restless with just sitting at home with his family, but he also isn’t too eager to go back to his job at the bank, despite them not wasting anytime trying to get him back. On the flip side, Fred has trouble getting any kind of work after coming home. His skillset of being a bomber in the war isn’t exactly applicable to most civilian jobs, and so he struggles to find any kind of work. On top of this, he got married only a few weeks before going off to the war, and so he has trouble adjusting to a life with someone that he never really knew all that well. Finally, Homer’s troubles lie more on the physical side of things. He lost both of his arms during the war, and so he can’t help but escape the pity and stares he gets when he comes home. All he wants is to be treated like he’s normal like everyone else, and so he has trouble confronting the fact that his life will never be normal again.

The movie puts the most attention on Al and Fred, but I found all three to be really engaging characters. I thought that their stories were all different enough and realistic in a way that I was invested in what was going to happen to all of them. We’re so far removed from World War II that it can feel like the movie is trying to represent a life way before ours, and so it’s hard to realize that the movie was really trying to represent present-day life for soldiers at the time. It’s so easy to see why this movie made as much of an impact as it did when it came out, and it’s still a really great way for modern people to gain a better understanding of what the post-war life was like for World War II soldiers.

I think that the biggest roadblock for a lot of viewers (aside from the simple fact that some people have a hard time watching black-and-white movies nowadays) is the movie’s length. The runtime is just under 3 hours, and so movies that long can always be a bit of a tough sell to people that aren’t serious about watching movies. And I’ll even acknowledge that there were points in the movie that felt a bit long, so the movie might have benefited from a shorter runtime. Still, I’ve always felt like a movie needs a justification for a long runtime, otherwise its shortcomings are just heightened. Luckily, The Best Years of Our Lives is a journey that feels like it’s worth taking. I was never really bored or anything during the movie, and so I didn’t mind it being as long as it was. Still, I’ll always acknowledge that this kind of thing can be a tough sell for a lot of people, so you do just need to understand what you’re getting yourself into if you choose to give it a shot.

I’m not really sure why The Best Years of Our Lives isn’t talked about as much anymore, to be honest. Perhaps I’m just not looking in the right places, but to me it feels like a movie that’s been largely forgotten. It still pops up on some critic all-time best movie lists, but beyond that I never really see casual audiences talk about it in the same way that they do about other movies of the time period like The Wizard of Oz or Casablanca. More than anything, I just want to bring attention to this movie, because I do think that it deserves to be talked about in the same breaths as these other classics. If you haven’t heard of this movie before and are interested in seeing some old classics, I suggest at least looking into this and seeing if it’s for you. Give it a shot, you might be pleasantly surprised like I was.

4/5