The Best Years Of Our Lives - 4½ Stars

Note: Very mild spoilers ahead.

Bad directors tell us what to think by putting their views in the mouths of the characters. Good directors show us what to think by the way a film goes - the good get rewarded, the wicked punished, or perhaps an ironic involution of that. Great directors don't really care about any of this and leave the whole thing up to us as viewers. The Best Years Of Our Lives, William Wyler's triumphant post-WW2 film, is in category 3.

The film's plot is simple - three soldiers return home from the war to a fictional Midwestern city and attempt to resume the lives they left behind. The three soldiers - Fred, Homer, and Sam - are respectively shown to be poor, middle-class, and wealthy. Fred's family basically lives on top of a bowling alley and below another bowling alley, and he struggles to find employment. Sam, meanwhile, is offered a job better than his previous one at the local bank. While I as a viewer expected there to be some class-related conflict between the two - and there certainly is - it is dealt with so much more skillfully than most class conflicts. There is a dearth of righteous indignation, a lack of grand speeches about the nobility of the poor or the poverty of the rich. Sam is demonstrably guilty about having a job at the bank while so many soldiers struggle to find prosperity. However, he does not say, 'I'm demonstrably guilty about having a job at the bank while so many soldiers struggle to find prosperity' - director Wyler and screenwriter Robert Sherwood leave many of the conflicts unspoken, and therefore more tense. We desperately want the characters to say what they're thinking, what we're thinking, and yet they so often refuse to. The film won 7 Oscars and it's fairly easy to see why - a little long, and a little bit of Hollywood keep this from being a 'perfect' 5 star film, but it is a must-watch for classic film buffs.