Hacker Cinema
The Best Years of Our Lives
1946 · Film · 171 min
Directed by William Wyler
It's the hope that sustains the spirit of every GI: the dream of the day when he will finally return home. For three WWII veterans, the day has arrived. But for each man, the dream is about to become a nightmare.
5 positive2 neutralfrom 7 commenters
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7 comments on Hacker News
Had to go to the comments in the linked post to find the reference to the soda jerk. And "jerking" was apparently pulling on the (seltzer) tap.
I suppose if "soda jerk" was thought to be a menial job (reminded of one of the threads in the film, "The Best Years of Our Lives" (1946)) ... then the original meaning of "jerk" as a loser might have come from that.
The Best Years of Our Lives is a genuine classic. Complex narrative, brilliant cinematography and performances. It is a much more difficult film than It's A Wonderful Life, and absolutely worth watching.
I’ll play:
The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)
Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.
Tons of noir films skirted the rules.
Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.
This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.
I can give you my list as I've also been watching lots of "old" movies. Though "old" can mean almost anything depending on who you ask. Note: I'm picky so while I love movies if I check my ratings (I take notes because I forget what I watched), it turns out I only like about one out of 10 movies. Or maybe to put it in a slightly better light, only 1 of 10 or so is worth recommending. Some might be okay but not okay enough to tell someone "you should seek out this movie"
Anyway, here's some from my list from the last year (the list of ones I didn't like is MUCH longer and includes many that are highly rated on IMDB)
"Now, Voyager" (1942)
"Boom Town" (1940)
"The Best Years of Our Lives" (1947)
"The Little Princess" (1939)
"Destry Rides Again" (1939)
"Baby Face" (1933)
"Adam's Rib" (1949)
"In a Lonely Place" (1950)
"It Happened One Night" (1934)
"The Woman of the Year" (1942)
"The Awful Truth" (1937)
"Broken Arrow" (1950)
"The Lady Eve" (1941)
"His Girl Friday" (1940)
"12 O'Clock High" (1949)
"You Can't Take It With You" (1938)
"The Far County" (1954)
"Random Harvest" (1942)
"The Bad and the Beautiful" (1952)
"The Philadelphia Story" (1940)
"Cry Danger" (1951)
"This Gun For Hire" (1942)
"Casablanca" (1942). I didn't get it at 23 where as I shook from crying at 50. Basically I needed to truly feel Rick's loss and what he was going through (Bogart's character). At 23 I didn't. At 50 I did. I suppose you could have similar experiences to Rick at a younger age or you could never have them and then not have it do anything for you.
I don't think any of them are "lesser known". Basically I just look up IMDB. If it's rated > 7 and sounds mildly interesting I'll take a look. Tons of them don't work for me. Those above did. As recent examples of ones that didn't "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" (1946), "Dark Passage" (1947), "Waterloo Bridge" (1940), "The Bishop's Wife" (1947), "Spellbound" (1945), "Fort Apache" (1948). Those are just from the last 2 weeks (^^;)
So glad someone got something from it!
Hehe yeah, does look like a lot. But 2012-now is..~2800 days, probably there's less than 1000 movies/episodes on there, I haven't counted. Recently watching a lot of series...I like the longer form. I moved into a house in 2012 where they introduced me to torrents - before then I'd hardly seen any great movies, so that was really amazing watching all the great movies and directors I'd always heard of but never checked out. (Had only downloaded books and music before that I guess!) Used to often watch 2 or 3 movies on weekend days. Lately a couple of episodes of a series (or more if bingeing) each night, or a movie. I did put a lot of hours into researching, reading reviews, finding good things to watch, so that we didn't see many that weren't good.
Finding obscure movies online is sometimes tricky (i.e. can take hours), also tracking down good subtitles can be hard, and often have to resync/shift them and/or fix them up. Being able to adjust audio and subtitles while watching with VLC is a must. I get them from:
1. torrents. Usually only works for popular/recent/famous stuff. Sno's torrents with hardcoded English subs are great, have watched a lot of those - mostly series, some movies.
2. movie and/or series sites like primewire, the now-defunct alluc, (which was amazing, finding obscure tv series episodes is much harder now), zocine.com, megashare.bz, www1.swatchseries.to that have links to online files. These come and go over the years. Adding "watch online" to google searches finds sites that the links to movie files can extracted from, either manually from the HTML or using TubeOffline-type downloader sites.
3. video sites. Google the movie/series name - often movies/episodes are on youtube/vimeo/dailymotion, especially when I forget to look for them there! Archive.org has a lot of stuff. (e.g. recently watched White Zombie (1932), the first zombie movie, and The Best Years of our Lives from there)
Not uncommonly an obscure movie will seemingly only be online in one hard-to-find place. (e.g. The only place I could find one classic Australian movie was on someone's page on vk, russian facebook!) I have a startpage with searches each of those sites one click away, so I only have to type the name (& mostly year) once. Whenever I get something from a site I add the site to my start page to easily search it in future. Also my computer is a Mac from 2005 which doesn't make it any easier! Good luck.
> A lot of it I think is an over reaction to the way returning troops from vietnam where treated.
Cultural concern for veterans coming home and being treated poorly, or being unable to readjust to civilian life, definitely predates the Vietnam war.
Consider "The Best Years of Our Lives"[0] from 1946, set after WW2.
[0] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0036868/
I suspect the Depression was more of a thing, because I'd asked about it. Most people did not do combat duty during the War. We won that war in the factories and oilfields.
It was also the most heavily propaganda-oriented thing in living memory. Y'know all them John Wayne war movies? Yep.
The classic propaganda movie is best exemplified by "Sergeant York". The scene where the dapper officer explains the conflict between "Thou Shalt Not Kill" and "Duty, Honor, Country" is exactly how propaganda works. "Well, it's not killing if they're Huns."
I always thought "The Best Years of Our Lives" exposed the more sinister aspects of the war experience ( it describes PTSD decades before the concept existed beyond "shell shock" or "battle fatigue" ) , and it's interesting that my favorite authors were either outsiders ( like Saul Bellow or Phillip Roth), pop historians ( Michener ) or those who went through the war as dogfaces ( Heller, Vonnnegut ).