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Cue Howard...
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We need a new recording of this wonderful music ...
THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES
and Hugo Friedhofer’s film score
Searingly poignant and joyously tender, William Wyler’s production of THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES remains a soaring testament to the sacrifice and heroism of “the greatest generation,” returning home to the uneasy reality they’d fought to preserve and protect.
The country was at once grateful, and unforgiving in their welcoming of the troops who had given up their lives and dreams to fight on foreign shores. While none of the returning American soldiers had asked for thanks or for special treatment, there was a growing and lingering resentment among some who had stayed at home, embarassed by the privileges they’d continued to enjoy, while vicariously sharing a victory won by the blood and emotional scarring of others. Boys had grown to men on foreign soil. Now they returned to their own country as strangers in a strange land, gladiators humbled by the pain of readjustment to an often indifferent, mundane, and trivial existence.
The idea for Wyler’s often sensitive, frequently painful examination of disruption and eventual repair, came from a Time Magazine pictorial article (August 7, 1944), addressing the difficulties of returning American soldiers readjusting to normal life and experience. Author MacKinlay Kantor was so moved by the Time portrayal that he turned the stories into a novel called Glory For Me. Producer Samuel Goldwyn purchased the novel, and commissioned Pulitzer Prize winning screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood to translate the book into visual expression. The film, re-titled THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES, starred Dana Andrews as a valiant gladiator, tortured by memories of battle, returning to a world in which his identity and persona were defined by a demeaning earlier position as a “soda jerk” at a pharmacy in his small home town. Now, matured beyond his years, dissatisfaction with his previous life experience seemed, to many, pompous and pretentious. Fredric March was also featured as a former bank executive coming home to his loyal wife, Myrna Loy, and precocious young daughter, Peggy, played by the lovely Teresa Wright. The scene in which March returns to his apartment and family is as memorable as any in screen history. As he opens the door, he quiets the excited reactions by his daughter and son, wanting to surprise his wife who is washing dishes alone in the kitchen. As she calls out to her children in the other room “Who is it?,” her query is met with silence. She calls again…and then stops in mid sentence. She intuitively reacts to an instinctual recognition of the quiet emanating from beyond the door, and gasps aloud. Turning slowly from the kitchen, she faces her husband, returned from the war. Their silent embrace speaks loudly, and in heartbreaking volume, of the pain of separation and reunion.
The cast is rounded out by first time screen actor, and real life embattled war amputee, Harold Russell, Cathy O’Donnell as the sweet and innocent love (Wilma) he left behind, and Hoagy Carmichael. Among the most sensitive performances is, however, by character actor Roman Bohnen as Dana Andrews’ father, whose tears of pride overwhelm the screen with gentle, understated beauty, as he attempts to read aloud his son’s commendation for wartime bravery to his wife at their squalid kitchen table. His simple reading of the military citation, while fighting back tears, is a powerful, understated gem of screen performance, under the direction of Willam Wyler and cinematographer Greg Toland.
Perhaps the most compelling component of Wyler’s film, however, is its majestic musical scoring by Hugo Friedhofer. Arriving in Hollywood in 1929, Hugo Friedhofer quickly established himself as one of the screen’s most able and popular orchestrators, working closely with such composers as Erich Wolfgang Korngold and Max Steiner on some fifty motion pictures. In 1938, he composed his first full original score for Samuel Goldwyn’s production of THE ADVENTURES OF MARCO POLO. He continued orchestrating scores for other composers. However, as his own reputation as a composer gained increasing stature, his availability as an orchestrator understandably decreased. In 1946, thanks to the enthusiastic intervention of Alfred Newman, Friedhofer was assigned the task of creating a score for THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES.
From the first notes of music illuminating the main title sequence, one is struck by the rapturous eloquence of the score. It is pure Americana, a proud and majestic salutation filling the horizon with hope and promise for a glorious future. This was a new country, a new America reborn from the scarring and smoldering ashes of war, a land of unbridled optimism consumed by the joy of victory, and the limitless promise of tomorrow. The air was fresh and clean once more, and imaginations soared above the clouds. Freed from the bondage of war and depravity, a nearly childlike wonder and innocence permeated America. There was virtually nothing that we couldn’t achieve or become, now that the chains of ideological slavery had been excised.
Friedhofer’s score gently caresses the healing emotional wounds of Wyler’s troubled veterans. Particularly tender, both visually and musically, is the nearly heartbreaking scene in which Homer invites Wilma to witness the utter helplessness he experiences when undressing for the night, laying his hooks on the chair by his bed. The remnants of what had once been his arms and hands, reduced by explosions to ineffectual stumps, leaves him exposed, ashamed, and as vulnerable as a small child, seeking comfort and protection from his mother, in the terrified night.
The score explodes with rage as Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) revisits the corpse of a once noble aircraft awaiting demolition in the scrap yards. Sitting in the ghostly cockpit, the pain of battle returns in searing waves and nightmares, as phantoms of fallen comrades invade his recollections, and Derry remembers the horrific intensity of smoke, screaming comrades and machine gun fire poisoning the clouds around him. Regaining his composure, Derry leaves the skeletal remains of the fallen eagle, and his past, behind him as he is offered a job and, at last, a degree of personal cleansing and redemption.
As Homer finds love and compassion in the arms of his childhood sweetheart, marriage vows bring sanity once more to the children of catastrophe. Fred and Peggy embrace a similarly uncertain, yet loving future together, as Friedhofer’s music reaches glorious crescendo, while both America and her people prepare to rebuild the best years of their lives.
–Steve Vertlieb, 2007
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A masterpiece. Back in the seventies I bought the re-recorded LP based on the score's reputation. At the time I was not familiar with the film and had just marginal knowledge of Friedhofer. The score really is very special--majestic, terrifying, heartwarming. A masterpiece of Americana.
Kickstarter?
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That’s awesome! I’m so glad this great podcast episode is introducing people to this truly great score.
Yavar
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I've been fascinated by The Best Years of Our Lives since I first watched it about 35 years ago. A large part of this interest is due to what the United States was like during those immediate post-war years (1945-49). I've watched anything and everything I could find about veterans coming home. This also includes other films, contemporaneous documentaries, and the period's American pop culture.
Have you seen So Proudly We Hail (1943)? It's not about vets coming home, but it goes alongside The Best Years of Our Lives as a moving portrait of "the same people," the same culture, under adversity. It's stars Claudette Colbert, Paulette Goddard, Veronica Lake, and George Reeves. It's pretty good.
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Posted: |
Jan 28, 2025 - 6:51 AM
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By: |
Rozsaphile
(Member)
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While writing a college paper on this film -- more than half a century ago! -- I stumbled across an adverse opinion from the noted Black writer James Baldwin. It was just an incidental remark in one of his books, namely, that the film was utterly false and disconnected from American reality. I did not agree with his hostility, then or now, but I found his remark useful for refutation in my celebratory review essay.
What bothered Baldwin, of course, was that the film did not reflect the worst aspects of urban poverty and Jim Crow racism. Those problems existed in 1945 and would become festering wounds in American culture during the following decades. Thus, narrowly speaking, Baldwin was correct. Wyler's optimistic vision was not a 360-degree scan of postwar culture. That point is still worth noting.
Needless to stay, I still revere Best Years for what it does. Scolding a film for what it does not attempt is a useless exercise. I loved the Collura recording as well. Alas, it is one of those albums I acquired in a Barclay-Crocker open-reel tape edition, the ne plus ultra of the day, and I am no longer equipped to play it.
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What bothered Baldwin, of course, was that the film did not reflect the worst aspects of urban poverty and Jim Crow racism.
In response to a white guy's dislike of Crazy Rich Asians, an Asian guy said something like "This wasn't made for you! Not everything has to be about you!" That seems like a fair answer to Baldwin.
I loved the Collura recording as well. Alas, it is one of those albums I acquired in a Barclay-Crocker open-reel tape edition, the ne plus ultra of the day, and I am no longer equipped to play it.
I listened to the whole damn podcast hoping they'd get to the rerecording, and they never mentioned it. I don't think they even know about it.
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Sorry you were disappointed, but they do know about it! It's just that they aren't concerned with film music *albums* really. They're not a soundtrack review show. They are all about examining how film scores work within the film... so the original film recording is what matters to them. I think there have been very rare exceptions where they talk about unused cues that were written for the film but either partially or fully dialed out.
They did a great Empire Strikes Back podcast a few months ago and they didn't mention the Charles Gerhardt recording either, to my recollection. They had more than enough to talk about already.
Yavar
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These are wonderful letters that have been shared here, and should be treasured forever. I also have received nice and treasured letters from Ferde Grofe, Ronald Stein and Albert Glasser. It's wonderful to receive heartfelt responses from greatly admired composers such as the Friedhofer one.
th3e
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Scolding a film for what it does not attempt is a useless exercise.
I agree 100%. It is useless, or even manipulative, implying that the thing it didn't do is, or should be, an assumed must. The film also didn't mention the disappearance of Flight 19 or the tornado outbreaks of '45 & '46, which must've affected so many people. Weird too that The Color Purple makes no mention of industrialization or the relatively nearby Galveston earthquakes.
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