The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)

Watched The Best Years Of Our Lives a few weeks ago. W-O-W. It was just wonderful in every aspect. The direction was great (from none other than my main man, William Wyler) and all the performances were so touching. Weep-worthy for sure :'-(

This picture is perfect. Completely. This is William Wyler on a bike/scooter thing. Best picture. Ever.


The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946) Dir. William Wyler

Cast:

Myrna Loy as Milly Stephenson Fredric March as Technical Sergeant Al Stephenson Dana Andrews as Captain Fred Derry Teresa Wright as Peggy Stephenson Virginia Mayo as Marie Derry Cathy O'Donnell as Wilma Cameron Hoagy Carmichael as Uncle Butch Harold Russell as Petty Officer 2nd Class Homer Parish

Plot Summary:

Three WWII veterans return home after the end of the war on a plane together to the same town, all to very different lives. Technical Sergeant Al Stephenson is returning home to his wife of 20 years, Milly and his two children, Peggy and Rob. As soon as he returns it is evident that he needs to take time to gell back in with them all, but they love him none the less. He was a banker before the war.

Captain Fred Derry returns home to his house to find out from his parents, who are living there, that his wife of only a few months had moved out and was working in a nightclub, last time they heard from her. He goes out searching for her and finally finds her in a new, considerably smaller apartment. She wishes he was still his "Glamourous Army Self" and their marriage is drifting d-o-w-n h-i-l-l... (first pic is of him and wife, the other is Al's daughter with him...)

Petty Officer 2nd Class, Homer Parish lost both of his hands in an incident whilst in the navy and now has special hooks that he has been trained to use as his hands. When he gets home, his girlfriend Wilma and Homer's own family find it hard to accept the fact that he has no hands and cannot adjust to the way he uses the hooks. Wilmer really does love Homer, but he finds it hard to believe that she would ever want him now that he has these hooks. {Just thought I'd mention that... HIS UNCLE IS HOAGY CARMICHAEL AND HE EVEN PLAYS "LAZY RIVER" ON THE PIANO IN HIS BAR!!!! OMG!}

Their lives become intertwined though, and they all soon come to realize that they have come back to a world very different from the one they were living in for the past few years...


The Verdict:
I have only ever seen Myrna Loy in The Thin Man and I completely thought that she was just amazing! The whole film was constructed very well and I always enjoy films like this where the whole family of the characters is brought in and introduced. And (to please my drama student-ness), it's such a great ensemble! I really love watching, and being, in ensemble pieces. It means that the whole cast has to work really hard together to make a winning combo and everyone in this cast certainly did! Yay!

Harold Russel who played Homer Parish is amazing too! He really was a war veteran and he used those hooks as hands always. He wasn't actually a professionally trained actor, and he became the only actor ever to win two academy awards for the same performance. How about that! But after the academy award buzz, William Wyler told him to go back to school and get an education because there, "weren't many roles for actors without hands." It seems he had a bit of a turbulent personal life, with his son ending up with a life sentence in jail.

The two other men in the movie, Frederic March and Dana Andrews are very good too. Particularly Frederic March, whose speech scene with Myrna Loy where he tells his bank that he wants to give out as much help to war veterans as possible was so amazing :'-). Yes. Happy tears. Dana Andrews was great too, but I think Frederic March and Teresa Wright upstaged him just a little.

Hoagy Carmichael. "Up a Lazy River". He can act too?!?! His album is played weekly (just on my iPod, not including my parents playing it, which happens a lot). How much cooler could Hoagy be? Really?

The camera guy who filmed the movie did the filming for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane too! How cool is that?

This is a definite must see for everybody. Particularly war movie-phobes. This could be a great intro to them, without all the war-talk. So glad we ordered it! Made a super-great evening family watch :-)

~Bette

The Pride of the Yankees(1942).

The Pride of the Yankees(1942). Biographical film directed by Sam Wood about the New York Yankees baseball player, first baseman Lou Gehrig, who had his career cut short at 37 years of age when he was stricken with the fatal disease amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (later known as "Lou Gehrig's Disease"). The film was released the year after Gehrig's death. Cast: Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright and Walter Brennan. Yankee teammates Babe Ruth, Bob Meusel, Mark Koenig, and Bill Dickey play themselves, as does sportscaster Bill Stern.

Columbia University student Lou Gehrig's, mother wants him to become an engineer, but.. Lou Gehrig has a gift for playing baseball. Sportswriter Sam Blake has a scout come out to see him play ball. Gehrig receives a contract offer from the New York Yankees. Lou Gehrig and his father decides to keep this a secret from his mother.

Gehrig wins over his teammates, and before long he is joining them in playing pranks on Ruth.

After a game in which he trips, he meets Eleanor Twitchell, who calls him a "Tanglefoot." It is not long before they fall in love and Lou and Ellie make plans to marry. The news, does not sit well with Gehrig's over baring mother. However, Lou finally stands up to her and marries Eleanor.

The Yankees start winning championships and all is going well for Gehrig. He hits two home runs in a single game as a promise to a sick boy in a hospital.(does that remind you of a Seinfeld episode?). But.. then without warning, Gehrig, baseball's "Iron Horse" begins to feel that somethings wrong.

Gehrig keeps on playing, keeping his illness a secret. But he is not the player he once was and one day he takes himself out of the game.

After an examination, a doctor tells Gehrig that he only has a short time to live.

In celebration at Yankee Stadium in his honor, Gehrig announces to his fans, saying that he has always felt like "the luckiest man on the face of the Earth."

I thought this was a wonderful inspirational movie and a nice way to remember Lou Gehrig.

Teresa Wright's first performance was in the stage play, Life with Father. It was there that she was discovered by a talent scout hired by Samuel Goldwyn to find a young actress for the role of Bette Davis' daughter in the film, The Little Foxes (1941). Which was the film that she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, she was nominated again, this time for Best Actress for The Pride of the Yankees, that same year, she won Best Supporting Actress as the daughter-in-law of Greer Garson's character in Mrs. Miniver. No other actor has ever has received an Oscar nomination for each of their first three films.

Please click here to read Teresa Wright's bio.

Teresa Wright.

Teresa Wright's first performance was in the stage play, Life with Father. It was there that she was discovered by a talent scout hired by Samuel Goldwyn to find a young actress for the role of Bette Davis' daughter in the film,  The Little Foxes (1941). Which was the film that she was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. The following year, she was nominated again, this time for Best Actress for The Pride of the Yankees, that same year, she won Best Supporting Actress as the daughter-in-law of Greer Garson's character in Mrs. Miniver. No other actor has ever has received an Oscar nomination for each of their first three films.

In 1943, Wright was loaned out by Goldwyn for the Universal film Shadow of a Doubt, directed by Alfred Hitchcock. She played an innocent young woman who discovers that her beloved uncle, played by Joseph Cotten, is a serial murderer.


Other notable films include The Best Years of Our Lives (1946),  a story about servicemen returning home after World War II, and The Men (1950), another story about war veterans.

After 1959, she worked mostly in television and on the stage. She was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1957 for The Miracle Worker and in 1960 for , White Story. She was in the 1975 Broadway revival of Death of a Salesman and the 1980 revival of Morning's at Seven, for which she won a Drama Desk Award as a member of the Outstanding Ensemble Performance.

Her later movie performances include, Somewhere in Time (1980) and The Rainmaker (1997), directed by Francis Ford Coppola.

Fun Fact: Her husband, Niven Busch, originally wrote Duel in the Sun (1946) for her to play the lead, as a departure from her girl-next-door roles. But pregnancy forced her to drop out, and Jennifer Jones got the lead.

Today TCM is Featuring Teresa Wright Films listed below:
The Best Years Of Our Lives
Mrs. Miniver
The Little Foxes

Enchantment (1948) is a romantic film starring David Niven and Teresa Wright. It was directed by Irving Reis. It was based on the novel Take Three Tenses by Rumer Godden.

Casanova Brown (1944) film starring Gary Cooper, Teresa Wright, and Frank Morgan. The film was written by Thomas Mitchell (the actor), Floyd Dell, and Nunnally Johnson, and directed by Sam Wood.

Great Dramas this month on Noir and Chick Flicks - The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946)

I mentioned to Dawn that we would concentrate on dramas during this month here on Noir and Chick Flicks. She agreed and I figured we would focus on some of the classic great dramas of all time. Dramas that focused on family life, married life, dramas dealing with important issues such as race, women's rights, medical dramas, prison dramas, etc. We could go on and on. But since November is a time of being thankful, I wanted to showcase some dramas that are very emotional and tug at the heart and make you think. So I hope everyone will enjoy this month here on Noir & Chick Flicks. And I decided to kick things off with the 1946 classic film The Best Years of Our Lives, which I recently wrote about on my blog, All Good Things.

This is one of my favorite films of all time, sitting right there nestled in my top 10. The story in this film centers on three returning WW Two veterans after the war has ended. Frederic March is Al Stephenson, who returns to his loving wife Milly (a magnificent performance by Myrna Loy), his two children Peggy (a terrific Teresa Wright) and Rob (Michael Hall). Al returns to an influential banking position, but finds it hard to reconcile his loyalties to ex-servicemen with new commercial realities. He has several scenes where he copes by drinking heavily. Dana Andrews is Fred Derry, an ordinary working man who finds it difficult to hold down a job or pick up the threads of his marriage with Virginia Mayo. He ends up falling for Peggy, and Peggy lets her mom know that she doesn't mind busting up the marriage to be with Fred. I was like, heck yeah, go for it Peggy. That's when I fell in love with Teresa Wright at that exact moment. And the last soldier is Homer Parrish (played by real life amputee Harold Russell) who unsure that his fiancée's (Cathy O'Donnell) feelings are still those of love and not those of pity. Each of these three men face a different crisis in their lives and try to cope and come through it emotionally sound. This movie is awesome. I can't find any faults with it. From the top notch cast to the expert direction by William Wyler to the epic music score by Hugo Friedhofer and the gorgeous cinematography by Gregg Toland. The Best Years of Our Lives is one of the best films ever made.

Facts about the film:

In 1946 this became the most successful film at the box office since Gone with the Wind (1939) which was released 7 years earlier.


For his performance as Homer Parrish, Harold Russell became the only actor to win two Academy Awards for the same role.


Myrna Loy receives top billing as she was the most successful female star at the time.

William Wyler, who served as a major in the Army Air Force during World War II, incorporated his own wartime experiences into The Best Years of Our Lives. Just as Fred Derry did in the movie, Wyler flew in B-17s in combat over Germany, although rather than being a bombardier, as Derry was, he filmed footage for documentary films. Additionally, Wyler modeled the reunion of Al and Milly, in which they first see each other at opposite ends of a long hallway, on his own homecoming to his wife, Talli.


This is the first film role for which Cathy O'Donnell, in the role of Wilma Cameron, receives screen credit. Her film debut was in Wonder Man (1945) as an uncredited extra in a nightclub scene.


In 1946 this became the most successful film at the box office since Gone with the Wind (1939) which was released 7 years earlier.


In 2007, the American Film Institute ranked this as the #37 Greatest Movie of All Time.

Happy Birthday Teresa Wright (1918 - 2005)

Happy Birthday to Teresa Wright, my all time movie crush. I absolutely adore her. She was an amazing actress. My favorite films of hers are The Little Foxes (1941), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Shadow of a Doubt (1943), The Best Years Of Our Lives (1946) and The Pride of the Yankess (1942). A very talented and beautiful woman, who should have got more praise than she did. And she was always in Oscar-worthy form -- the only performer ever to be nominated for Oscars for her first three films, The Little Foxes, Mrs. Miniver, and Pride of the Yankees. How's that for amazing?

The Little Foxes

Just a few hours ago I was about to look on YouTube to find some interesting videos to spend the afternoon watching, interviews of classic movie stars and the like. It suddenly occurred to me that I could search "The Little Foxes" just to see what came up, and just as if it was put there for me personally, there was the entire film in neat ten and a half minute parts. I had been wanting to see this for ages, but on amazon it costs about £12 rather than the usual £3 for an old movie, and I thought I would just have to wait until Christmas. Well, even if I had had to wait until Christmas it would have been well worth the wait.

I'm not about to explain the whole complicated plot, but the basic storyline is this. Regina Giddens (Bette Davis at her most evil) tricks everyone into giving her what she wants. Even her husband (Herbert Marshal), who is in hospital with severe heart trouble, gives her whatever she asks for. When her brothers start to form a plan to partner up with a cotton manufacturer to make a mill near the cotton fields in their neighbourhood, she jumps at the opportunity to "make it big". She plans to force her husband into making the decision, but her plans take a turn for the worse when her suffering husband refuses to invest. Alongside this is the fact that her daughter (Teresa Wright, Mrs. Miniver) is turning out to be the complete opposite of her vindictive mother.

Wow. This is a pretty fantabiedoobie film. I didn't expect it to be so well put together, and the script by Lillian Hellman is great. She wrote the stage version that was a vehicle for Tallulah Bankhead, who hated Bette Davis because she was more successful in her roles when they were turned into films than she was in the plays (she played Judith Traherne in Dark Victory on stage), but more on that in another post. I thought the costumes were fabulous (even if Bette thought they should have been less fancy considering that the Giddens family was suffering financially), they were all very intricate and the costume in one crucial scene for Bette Davis conveys the conniving, calculating hideous thing that she does extremely well. When I remember that scene I remember her face and the stiff dress she wears best.

~Bette