silver nitrate notes

The Best Years of Our Lives and Toland's Last Major Film

8 apr 2020

William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) was Gregg Toland's last major credit. Toland died of a heart attack in 1948 at forty-four. What he and Wyler produced in their fourth collaboration is a film about three American servicemen returning from the war and discovering, at varying paces, that the country they fought for had become a different country in their absence.

The runtime is 172 minutes. The film is talky in the modern sense. Most of the scenes are conversations. Toland's photography is deep focus, naturally; he had been working in deep focus since 1937. What is unusual is how the deep focus is used in this film. Almost every conversation includes a relevant third person at a different distance from the camera. The audience can read the conversation's primary participants and the third person's reaction simultaneously, in the same frame, without cutting.

The famous shot is the sequence in Butch's bar. The disabled veteran Homer (Harold Russell, a real veteran with prosthetic hands who was not a professional actor) plays the piano with his hooks while Fred (Dana Andrews) takes a phone call in the background. Toland frames the shot so that Homer is in the foreground at the piano, in focus; Fred is in the middle distance at the phone booth, also in focus; the bartender in the deep background is also in focus. The phone call ends Fred's marriage to a woman the audience has come to dislike. Homer's hands continue the song. The composition does not announce its emotional weight. It simply lets the audience watch three things happen at once.

Russell won two Oscars for the role: a competitive Best Supporting Actor and an honorary award given for his courage in undertaking the part. Wyler won Best Director. Toland was nominated for cinematography and lost to Arthur Miller for Anna and the King of Siam. Anna and the King of Siam is fine. It is not the better-shot film.

The final sequence, in which Homer marries his fiancée in a small home wedding, is one of the longest single sequences in postwar American cinema. Toland holds Homer's hands in the foreground throughout the ring exchange. The film ends on Fred and Peggy (Teresa Wright) embracing, with Toland framing them in a deep-focus three-shot that includes Homer and Wilma in the background. Everyone Toland is asking us to care about is in the same shot.

[ « prev: The Life of Oharu · next: Tokyo Story » ]

» leave a comment in the guestbook

sources
[1] Madsen, Axel. William Wyler: The Authorized Biography. Crowell, 1973.
[2] Toland, Gregg. "Photographing The Best Years of Our Lives." American Cinematographer, December 1946.
[3] Bordwell, David. On the History of Film Style. Harvard UP, 1997.
[4] Sherwood, Robert E. Screenplay (in The Best Years of Our Lives, Viking, 1947).