The Best Years Of Our Lives

William Wyler - 1946
This is a terrific piece of classical filmaking; and its shot by Greg Toland. So we have that huge depth, sides of faces (facing away) allowed close to the camera, and those huge pinsharp rooms. The compositons have Wyler's zigzagging, which acts as a depth cue. These formal devices are very much part of the general picture of society that is trying to be built up.
I mean by that that having so much in one shot, in the long takes, gives that sense of clautrophobia, anxiety and stuffiness to the composition and the frame. Form and content together, the former reflecting the uneasiness that is throughout this film. It isn't too extreme, apart from the music not massively milked, but it really is what gives the film its life.
This film, for all its typical structure, is sharp in the way it head-on confronts a social issue, and a difficult one. If I praised 'The Hurt Locker' for giving thirty seconds to the issue, Wyler does so for two and three quarter hours, and should be credited accordingly. A serious film about serious feelings, which doesn't try to hide the complexity; there is so much going on here. We have not only the main one of the returning veterans, but inter-generational stuff, issues about marriage; in other words, it is complex, like life can be.
Is it a little staid? It is an intricate realist picture, technically brilliant (the phone booth shot, of course), but I wouldn't call it poetic; more like daringly understated in that scene. What this film has is detail; the editing hardly lets us lose a second, a moment, of the action of the lives. This is the connection to neorealism; we watch them make a cup of coffee. This, combined with its social breadth, also put me in mind of 'Rocco and His Brothers'. These are high marks for a studio product to live up to, but this is one of the finest.