19th Academy Awards · 1947
The Best Years of Our Lives
Directed byCooked up by William Wyler
“Three wonderful loves in the best picture of the year!”
“Coming home after the war hits different. Squad sticks together 🇺🇸”
The storyThe lore 📖
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.
Three World War II vets, Al, Fred, and Homer, come home to the same small town, and adjusting to normal life is harder than anyone expected 🇺🇸. Al feels out of place at his bank job, Fred can't find good work, and Homer, a sailor who lost his hands in the war, worries how his sweetheart will see him. It's a heartfelt look at coming home, and the squad's friendship carries. Highkey one of the best ever.
What critics & audiences sayThe receipts 🧾
Tomatometer
97%
Fresh
#10 of 98 winnersFamous linesLines living rent free
I gave up the best years of my life, and what have you done? You flopped!
So I said to him, 'I'm sorry Major, no collateral, no hill.' So we didn't take the hill and we lost the war.
The thing that scares me most is that everybody is gonna try to rehabilitate me.
Fred: Thirty-two fifty. I used to make over four hundred dollars a month in the Air Force.
Mr. Thorpe: The war is over, Derry.
Milly: What do you think of the children?
Al: Children? I don't recognize 'em. They've grown so old.
All I want is for people to treat me like anybody else instead of pitying me.
How many times have I told you I hated you, and believed it in my heart. … How many times have we had to fall in love all over again?
When we were married, babe, the Justice of the Peace said something about 'For richer, for poorer, for better, for worse.' Remember? Well, this is the 'worse.'
His collateral is in his hands, in his heart and his guts. It's in his right as a citizen.
I know what to say, Homer. I love you and I'm never going to leave you, never.
Quotes via Wikiquote
Filming locationsWhere they shot it 📍
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Ontario Army Air Field
Ontario, California
Fred Derry's walk among the ruined bombers was shot at this scrap yard holding nearly 2,000 retired combat aircraft.
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Ontario International Airport
Ontario, California
One of the real-world locations used when filming began in April 1946, just months after the war ended.
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Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden
Arcadia, California
Among the varied locations used when shooting started on April 15, 1946.
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Samuel Goldwyn Studios
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
The Samuel Goldwyn/Warner Hollywood lot served as one of the production's studio bases.
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Raleigh Studios
Hollywood, Los Angeles, California
Another Hollywood studio facility used during the 1946 shoot.
Fun factsFacts that go hard 🤓
- Harold Russell, a non-professional actor, received an honorary Oscar because the Academy assumed he would lose Best Supporting Actor, then won that too. He is the only actor to receive two Academy Awards for the same performance.Wikipedia · Awards and honors
- In 1992, Harold Russell sold his Best Supporting Actor statuette at auction for $60,500 to pay his wife's medical bills.Wikipedia · Awards and honors
- Samuel Goldwyn was inspired to make the film after reading an August 1944 Time article about veterans struggling to return to civilian life.Wikipedia · Production
- The film began as MacKinlay Kantor's novella Glory for Me, which Kantor wrote in blank verse before Robert E. Sherwood adapted it into a screenplay.Wikipedia · Production
- Fred Derry's walk through a bomber graveyard was filmed at a former Army airfield in Ontario, California, which had become a scrapyard for nearly 2,000 combat aircraft awaiting disassembly.Wikipedia · Production
- William Wyler, who had flown combat missions filming Memphis Belle, asked the principal actors to buy their own clothes and built life-size sets to make the film feel authentic.Wikipedia · Production
- The Best Years of Our Lives was the highest-grossing film in both the U.S. and the U.K. since Gone with the Wind, and was later named the sixth most-attended film of all time in Britain with over 20 million tickets sold.Wikipedia · Introduction
- Despite the film's massive success, RKO actually recorded a loss of $660,000 on it because of its distribution arrangement with Samuel Goldwyn.Wikipedia · Popular response
- French critic André Bazin used the film's deep-focus scene, where Fred makes a crucial phone call in the far background while Homer and Butch play piano up front, to illustrate his theory of realism in film.Wikipedia · Critical response
- The fictional Boone City was patterned after Cincinnati, and aerial shots show Xavier University's Corcoran Stadium and the downtown Cincinnati skyline.Wikipedia · Production