For a number of years now I have considered The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) a personal favorite. Whenever I hear it mentioned on a podcast -- and Filmspotting recently did an extended discussion during their William Wyler marathon -- I get a bit giddy, as you do when someone else endorses such a personal favorite. Since I'd seen it only once, it was a no-brainer to add it to the slate for Understanding Editing, arriving chronologically in April after Sergeant York (1941) and before King Solomon's Mines (1950).
But then recently -- in another moment of reflecting on it positively, the reason for which I can't now remember -- I checked its Letterboxd rating to ensure I'd given it the full available five stars. And was horrified by what I found:
3.5 stars.
I scratched my head. Maybe not literally, but possibly literally.
My first theory about the explanation for this star rating was that at the time I retroactively assigned its star rating when adding all my films on Letterboxd, I'd momentarily confused it with You Can't Take It With You, another best picture winner from around that time whose title is approximately the same mouthful of words. I confuse the two in my mind sometimes. That theory shouldn't hold water, though, because I also quite liked You Can't Take It With You, considering that at least a four-star movie. (Checking Letterboxd now and confirming the four stars for YCTIWY.)
My next theory had to do with the amount of time that had elapsed between when I first saw The Best Years of Our Lives and when I gave out that star rating, as I can have momentary dead spots in my memory of how well I liked a film. But that theory sputtered out as well. My viewing of TBYOOL was on December 19, 2010, and it was only in early to mid 2012 that I added all my movies to Letterboxd.
I guess it has to be the final theory: I was much more stingy with my star ratings back then.
Because I was sure this was one of my 20 favorite best picture winners of all time, and possibly the best movie ever made -- that I've seen, anyway -- about soldiers returning from war.
Well, I didn't get that one quite right either. In this post in which I ranked all 88 (at the time) best picture winners, it was about exactly halfway down the list at #44. Now, that was based only on my Flickchart rankings at the time, and on Flickchart, it was a healthy #916. I would say that all my top 1000 films are at least four-star films unless they've been misranked. Still, the following blurb about it indicates how much more I thought of it than the star rating I gave it:
"This one had a pretty big impact on me. Not only was it a profound consideration of men returning from war, but what about that incredible performance by Harold Russell -- who really lost his hands in World War II."
So I was still scratching my head when I went into Tuesday night's viewing of The Best Years of Our Lives for Understanding Editing, eager to see whether my true feelings are that I think it's great, which is what's in my memory, or that I think it's at least slightly middling, which is what's in my star rating.
I'm glad to say it was the former.
This is an absolute banger of a movie -- an absolute banger that plays out slowly and determinedly over two hours and 50 minutes.
And basically does not have anything distinctive about its editing at all.
That's not an insult. It's actually part of a growing understanding of how an appreciation for editing can be expressed by one's peers, the other editors who do the nominating.
Daniel Mandell won one of his three editing Oscars for The Best Years of Our Lives, the others being The Pride of the Yankees (1942) and The Apartment (1960). What the three films have in common is that they do not contain anything resembling action or fast motion, sequences that would specifically benefit from the sure hand of an accomplished editor. That makes all three films different from the three I've watched in this series so far: Lost Horizon, The Adventures of Robin Hood and Sergeant York.
And though I had other choices for the fourth movie in this series, I'm glad I chose one that did not feature any ostentatious sequences like the ones that (presumably) won the Oscars for their editors in those films. If I only looked for films that had the most editing, I might have missed some that had the best.
But what makes the straightforward editing in The Best Years of Our Lives the best? That may be harder to determine. Though I do have a theory.
The other thing The Best Years of Our Lives has in common with one of Mandell's other Oscar wins, The Apartment, is that both films also won best picture. In fact, best editing was one of seven Oscar wins for TBYOOL.
So now I have a theory that editing is one of those categories that can get swept up in the fervor of the love for a movie, whether this discipline actually does exceed the work of the other nominees or not.
Think about the other movies that have won basically everything, say, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, which was nominated for 11 Oscars and won all 11. (A feat it likely pulled off by not being nominated in any of the acting categories.) What are the chances that the movie actually had better cinematography, editing, makeup, costume design, visual effects, original song, original score and sound mixing than every other movie made in 2003, to focus only on the "lesser" categories it won? I'd say not great, but people loved that movie so much, and wanted so much to honor Peter Jackson's achievement with the trilogy, that a certain specificity of analysis was lost in favor of the wave of admiration and affection directed at the movie. Since this is a piece about editing, I'd say that at the very least, of the other 2003 editing nominees, Seabiscuit probably could have taken down LOTR if it had not already been winning everything else.
So something like that may have happened with The Best Years of Our Lives, which was very undoubtedly the Best Movie of Its Year. (Some would make an argument for the similarly titled It's a Wonderful Life, but they'd be wrong. Then again, my own word should not be taken about this because I have Lives at #651 and Life at #481 on Flickchart, as my past confusion about Lives continues to rear its head.)
But let's set aside this undermining analysis that Mandell's work was the collateral recipient of other praise, and try to figure out what he was doing that earned him this victory.
Although I didn't take a lot of notes while watching The Best Years of Our Lives -- I never usually take notes while watching a movie, even one I'm reviewing, but have been specifically doing so for this series -- I'd say that was for two reasons. For one, there weren't that many specific sequences I wanted to write about later. Perhaps more importantly, though, I was just fully engrossed in the movie, and would rather have that experience than to be scribbling down my thoughts.
I did want to draw attention to one sequence, though, in which editing was a momentary focus. It's when the oldest of the three soldiers we're following, Al Stephenson (Fredric March), finds himself a bit overwhelmed and at loose ends, and forces his wife and daughter out on the town on the very night he returns home to Boone City. They are not into the idea but they placate him. We see their night's adventures captured in montage, with the neon sign of each new haunt dissolving in on the previous action to announce the next location. It's a beautiful example of compact storytelling.
And I think that's really what Mandell's editing is doing here, along with Robert E. Sherwood's script: compacting. That's a rather extraordinary thing to say about a movie that's nearly three hours long, the first hour or more of which takes place in a single 72-hour period as the soldiers catch a plane together to their hometown. But I found this film a marvel at the script level, as each scene comprising those 170 minutes contributes in a meaningful way to the journeys these characters go on as they return from war. The editing is the necessary companion to this script, the unseen collaborator that helps make it flow.
Because I don't have a lot of substance to say about the editing, I wanted to quickly discuss another element that my close reading of the film made me appreciate.
The film did not win a best cinematography Oscar for Gregg Toland's work here, Toland being the DP on Citizen Kane and other great films. There were only two black-and-white cinematography nominees that year (the categories were separated into color and black and white) and Toland wasn't one of them. The Oscar went to Arthur C. Miller for Anna and the King of Siam.
But Toland's work here astonished me. My favorite sequence was one between Teresa Wright's Peggy and Virginia Mayo's Marie in a club powder room, the former being the one in love with Dana Andrews' Fred Derry and the latter being the one who's married to him, but does not love him. The latter doesn't have any idea about the former's feelings as she blithely discusses Fred's shortcomings and the former takes them quietly in. Toland's camera continues to move and reframe the two in the shot, at times using their reflection in the mirror, but always shifting to a new two shot. It kind of blew my mind, and underscored a shifting dynamic in the scene that only one of the two is aware of.
You could say this is part of the editing in a way, in that the camera does the work that an editor might ordinarily do. When to edit and when to let a shot run is also, I would argue, part of great editing.
In summary: The Best Years of Our Lives is awesome, I have no idea what I was thinking about when I gave it 3.5 stars, and the editing does not need to call attention to itself in order to make it an essential component of the whole experience.
As mentioned earlier, I will move on to Compton Bennett and Andrew Marton's King Solomon's Mines in May.
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