Review of The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) by Mae D — 23 Jun 2007

It's so hard for me to convince people to sit down for three hours and watch a black and white movie with no action sequences.

This is one of the most amazing movies ever made. You rarely see such amazingly well-written characters. Three men return home from WWII to three different situations, and each have their problems adjusting to life after serving. And it was filmed so shortly after the war ended; I've never seen any film capture a post-war haze like this. Homer, the simple, loveable young man who lost both hands in the war and now has two startling, artificial appendages, is played by a man who actually lost his hands. The whole movie is incredibly real and not heavily romanticized, as you might expect.