Nominated against Henry V, It's a Wonderful Life, The Razor's Edge and The Yearling, The Best Year of Our Lives won the Best Picture of 1946 for several reasons, each of which have made it a fairly well known, although little seen, movie in subsequent years. Foremost among these influences is its production immediately after World War II with this transitional period serving as the film's subject and dramatic tension. Second is the effect of black and white spectacle achieved by Citizen Kane-alum Gregg Toland whose camera showcases the movie's stars as well as its sets by Julia Heron. Third is the high level of excellent performances offered by the cast, not the least of whom was Harold Russell whose double amputation due to wartime military service somehow endowed his part with the sober marks of a man who has suffered.

Lastly the main reason I think The Best Years of Our Lives is well known in awards circles, film societies and among historically oriented people who have never seen it is the fact it's nearly 3 hours long. Not as long as some other big screen, award-winning spectacles like Gone with the Wind or Lawrence of Arabia but it's 3 hours nonetheless.

Perhaps our current day lacks the patience necessary to soak in the joys of the cinema released with titles of such substantial length. Or, perhaps like a compulsion of market-oriented lemmings, we thirst for quickly renewing treats like TV commercials and thusly our attention spans have worn thin through years of interruption.

The resulting tendency is a public unable to endure scant entertainment over 2 hours endurance. Sports events, tragedies and coronations aside, we are a society consumed with quick glimpses, witty pundits and edited sound bytes to fill up the gaps between our channel-surfing ways and multi-tasking minds.

A film like The Best Years of Our Lives is an affront to such impatience because it takes place over time with a story befitting its epic style and length. But its purpose is not simply to blow away its audience like the more insatiable Oscar-winning hits of today, Titanic as the primary example. Instead William Wyler's movie sets to the difficult and usually ignored problem of post-war adjustment as fighting men return from their warrior's ways and try to fit into the society they were asked to protect.

Eschewing battle sequences, war flashbacks, remembrances of atrocity or voice-over narrations explaining a character's behavior like so many other war movies of the last 20 years, The Best Years of Our Lives relies on the dramatic tension of speech, enactment and setting to help its story unwind. In short, it tells the inter-related stories of three veterans coming home from the war.

Al Stephenson (Frederic March) is a well-off officer returning to his wife Milly (Myrna Loy) and daughter Peggy (Teresa Wright). Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) is a working class guy with aimless qualities, a shady past and very few opportunities to stretch beyond blue-collar life. Homer Parrish (Russell) is the broken GI having returned home with prosthetic limbs and hook-like attachments instead of his hands.

Al, Fred and Homer's problem lay in the fact of how the war interrupted their lives to varying degrees and with varying results. Al has become a more successful businessman and protective father, Fred ends up the suitor of Al's daughter which makes the older man even more protective while Homer tries to imagine a positive direction for himself since his physical person has been so dramatically altered by the war.

Also unlike future post-war movies like Coming Home, The Best Years of Our Lives doesn't portray these three men and their war experience as a fool's paradise. They are clean-shaven, decent men trying to make good on the promise of earlier days. They are charming, well spoken and handsome, or else tragically inspiring like Homer, and this embodiment of universal masculinity lends well to the healing circumstance of 1946.

After eventually learning to trust one another and their changing hometown the three veterans are made whole once again, complimented by the women they love. Of course there are numerous struggles on the way to this resolution but two of the most memorable aspects of the film are the looming characteristics of the war somehow looming in the background yet somehow oddly visible throughout.

Obviously Homer's missing arms remind us about the dangers of war machines. Still he is not a pathetic or helpless character and it is this quality of optimism that makes him a bonafide hero. The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences even saw fit to award him not one but two Oscars for his role, one for supporting performance and another honorary Oscar for his inspirational qualities as one of the walking wounded.

The other way the war filters in is through the physical detritus of air machines the three men once flew into combat. Most remarkably this military memory is shaped in a scene where Fred visits a junkyard filled with the rotting carcasses of uncountable bombers. His visit as a transformative experience couldn't be rendered through more strongly symbolic terms in that the stakes of the movies are made clear. Fred and his ilk, Al and Homer included, must somehow move past the consignment heap of unwanted wartime tools or else risk becoming part of the festering pile.

In the end each man finds his way back into civilian life thereby filling out the film's title with appropriate fanfare. "The best years of our lives," is both a celebration and a cynical commentary on the pain of transitions and change. It is also the way fundamental optimism is assumed to shape the American spirit and produce goodness in unpleasant circumstances. This ideological contrast is also what makes the film's story classic and so undeniably important to the history of the 20th century.

Other movies released in 1946 also found a substantial following even without Oscar nominations for Best picture and included The Big Sleep, My Darling Clementine and Duel in the Sun. Such films have their supporters and critics alike but one other film stands aside from these studio productions created, financed and first released in the United States because it was the symbol of production circumstances, themes and cultural values of another country.

Not to detract from the achievement of The Best Years of Our Lives, there were other international film movements afoot after World War II. Among them was Italian Neorealism with its reliance on documentary-like narratives set in and among the then-present day world of post-war Italy. Films in the cycle lacked the polish of their American cousins and several of them, like Open City released in 1946, saw their local subjects opened up to international acclaim announcing a wider range of movie producers and themes than had been previously imagined.

The world of movie entertainments was growing. No longer were theater screens to be largely divided among the latest products of America, France and Germany, in that order according to reach and number of screens across the globe. With the release of Open City and the flurry of other films in its wake the art cinema was born and so was an important alternative to the work of Hollywood's studio master that was so completely epitomized by The Best Years of Our Lives, an enduring, though 3-hour long classic.