Back in the 1980s when I was an undergraduate at Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey, I was probably what the Millennial generation would call an “incel.” I had a genuinely rotten childhood. My mother couldn’t stand me. I graduated from one of the worst public high-schools in the state of New Jersey, and to be quite honest I was just a little afraid of girls. Most of the girls I knew in high school bullied me because I didn’t smoke pot or wear heavy metal T-shirts. My brother would spread rumors behind my back that I was gay.

Between the ages of 18 and 22, I spent most of my time in the Alexander Library on College Avenue, alone, in a metal stall, reading. My only companion was a homeless man, a 1970 graduate who had taken too many drugs during the 1960s to have gotten on any kind of a career path, and subsequently never left the campus. When it got cold, he would take shelter in the University media lab, watching French New Wave movies, and researching the Kennedy assassination. Occasionally he would come over and strike up a conversation.

“Do you see this?” he said, pointing to a copy of Paris Match and a review of the Richard Gere movie Breathless. “Do you see this?”

“I haven’t seen it yet,” I said, “but I’m hoping to watch it when they have it at Blockbuster Video.”

“Don’t watch that crap,” he said. “See the original. Only see the original.”

“There was an original?” I said. “Is there a book?”

“No there isn’t a book,” he said. “Do you know the Zionists shot JFK,” he added before I could tear myself away. “Fucking de Gaulle was going to give them the bomb and Kennedy was going to stop it. So they sent the Mossad.”

“Look,” I said. “I agree that there’s always been something a little suspicious about the Warren Commission but I’m going to follow you down this path. I’m not a Nazi and I’m not an anti-Semite and I’m not going to scapegoat the Jews.”

“I bet you don’t know what Jack Ruby’s real name was, right?” he said, looking intently into my eyes, and shaking my chair. “Oh you don’t. Well color me surprised. Take a guess. It will seem obvious once I tell you. Ever hear of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Trilateral Commission? Do the names Kissinger and Brzezinski ring a bell? Do some research. Think. Don’t just scapegoat the CIA like everybody else does. Go research the Lavon Affair. Use your head. Don’t be an unthinking fucking liberal.”

One day in my junior year, everything changed. I was sitting in Brower Commons, the University Dining Hall, alone with a copy of The Sorrows of Young Werther by Goethe, when I suddenly noticed I was surrounded by sorority girls, which was odd considering how I usually sat far off in the corner underneath the entrance ramp behind the tables used by the black frats. But it was unmistakable. It felt a bit like that scene at the schoolyard from The Birds by Hitchcock. Every few minutes I would look up and see another willowy blond beauty sit down at the table with her tray and begin eating. Even stranger, I noticed that when I looked up and down the table one or two of them would try to catch my eye. Finally a girl sat down next to me and tried to strike up a conversation. “Good book,” she said, except for the happy ending. I like my literature a bit darker.” Of course I didn’t say a word back, being so terrified that I could barely stop myself from running away but it didn’t matter. The next day the same thing happened. I was surrounded by beautiful woman. What the hell was going on?

Finally, after one of the girls pushed a flier in my direction inviting me to the Annual Greek Blood Drive and Christmas Party, I figured it out. “You are coming, aren’t you Jonathan?” she said before handing me another pile of fliers. “We really need your help to get the word out.” As terrified as I was of engaging in conversation with a member of the opposite sex, I managed to to elicit from her the information that a young man named Jonathan Daimlerhoff had just been elected President of the Fraternity Council, that he was a popular and charming young man with a large trust fund and a late model German car who frequently took ski trips in Vermont and threw off campus parties where large amounts of alcohol were available to people of all ages, and where the cops never harassed people since Mr. Daimlerhoff’s father was a prominent lawyer no policeman would dare cross by arresting any of his son’s guests. I also learned that I was his spitting image, that we resembled each other so much that even the cheap ugly clothes my mother got me from K-Mart didn’t clue people in that I was Stanley the Incel Rogouski and not Jonathan the Chad Daimlerhoff. I never found out the young woman’s name but she answered my questions so politely that I briefly overcame my fear of women. She even invited me to the Christmas Party to give blood. I declined.

So why have I begun a film review with such a long autobiographical digression?

In 1946, William Wyler released The Best Years of Our Lives, a film that not only won Best Picture, but became an immediate classic, widely considered to be one of the greatest American movies ever made. Starring well-known Hollywood stars like Dana Andrews, Virginia Mayo, Frederick March, Myrna Loy, Virginia Wright, and non-professional actor Harold Russell, the film told the story of three American veterans of World War II, and their struggles to reintegrate themselves into civilian life. For March, who plays Sergeant Al Stephenson, it all goes fairly smoothly. Even though he served as an enlisted man in the infantry, he has inherited money, a good education, and a position as Vice President of a local bank. He soon establishes himself as a socially concerned progressive willing to extend credit to fellow veterans even though they may lack sufficient collateral. For Harold Russell, who plays Homer Parrish, a gravely wounded sailor who lost both his arms when a Japanese Kamikaze hit the aircraft carrier he was serving on, the challenges are far more severe. Yet he still has the advantage of a solid middle class family and a fiancée willing to stay with him even with his horrible disability. Then there’s Captain Fred Derry, an army air force veteran, and the film’s main protagonist.

When we first meet Fred Derry he seems to have everything going for him. At 37, Dana Andrews was probably a bit too old to play the role of a young man who was at most in his mid-20s, but it’s easy to see why he was cast. Having already starred in the 1944 film The Purple Heart, where he played a bomber commander shot down over Japan during the Doolittle Raid who marched off to his execution by slow torture spitting defiance and patriotic fervor at his Japanese captors, Andrews was exactly the image most Americans had in their minds when they heard the phrase “war hero.” Andrews was of average height and build and not particularly handsome, but something about the way he carried himself makes you want to stand up and salute. Unlike the almost comically gigantic, macho John Wayne, Andrews came off like the kind of American everyman who rose to the occasion after Pearl Harbor and bravely volunteered to fight Hitler and the Nazis. When we first meet Derry, Parrish, and Stephenson, who immediately become friends on the trip back home to fictional Boone City (Cincinnati Ohio) Derry comes across as their leader, a commanding presence in his captain’s bars and collection of ribbons and medals.

Once back in Boone City, however, we realize that Derry is not all he seems to be. First of all, he’s homeless. Born into a lower working class family beaten down by the Great Depression, his parents live in a shack near the railroad. His mother is a sad, timid woman whose very manner seems to apologize for her existence. It’s early morning and his father is already drunk. Derry has no education. Immediately after graduating from high school, he got a job as a low wage “soda jerk” at a local drug store and stayed there for two years, unable to rise to anything but head clerk with a mousy little assistant he nicknames “stinky.” Probably born in 1921 or 1922, Fred Derry was still in grade school when the Great Depression hit and his formative years were spent in a country filled with poverty and despair. The New Deal and Franklin Roosevelt had made some progress in putting the economy back together but after the Republicans demanded more austerity and the Supreme Court ruled the NRA as unconstitutional, the country slid back down into a recession in 1936.

Then a miracle happened. The Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor and the American economy roared back to life and to heights nobody had previously imagined. During World War II the United States was effectively a socialist country with a planned economy, full employment, and a socially progressive President who backed down in the face of a potential general strike led by black leaders like A. Phillip Randolph and opened up jobs in the defense industry to women and racial minorities. People who had previously been unable to use their talents or enter the American mainstream suddenly found themselves gainfully employed, with hopes for the future and dreams of a better life. Fred Derry, an athletic young man with real courage, was quickly singled out by his superiors, and sent to officer training school, after which he was assigned to a job as a bombardier in a B-17 over Germany, a horrifically dangerous position with a low survival rate that makes a young man live for the day and take risks. The no status soda jerk suddenly finds himself an officer and a gentleman, and in the eyes of women almost a rock star. One week on leave, he marries a glamorous young woman named Marie, played by the A-list beauty Virginia Mayo. It’s not a real marriage, only a brief fling, but if you fully expect to die, why not tie the knot and make it official. Why not take possession of some high quality wedding photos you can tape up in your B-17 like pinups to show off to your crewmates, who take one look at your wife, and after convincing themselves you’re telling the truth, bow down and declare themselves not worthy to be in your presence. Fred, you the man.

Once the war is over, however, you are faced with a much more difficult fate then dying. You have to live, not as a glamorous hero facing an almost certain death fighting Hitler, but as what you once were, a lower working-class nobody with no real skills or education. Marie, your wife, is somewhere in Boone City, but she’s long since forgotten you. You can get your old job at the drugstore back, but at a lower rate of pay and with Stinky as your boss. What’s more, your coworkers resent returning veterans as a threat to their jobs, and the customers have no idea what you were only a few months before. You try to make a go of it with Marie, and even try to pressure her into becoming a stay at home wife, but she has no interest in quitting her own job, at a nightclub, and you are no longer the man she was attracted to in the first place, an officer, a gentleman, and a hero. What’s more you realize that you and Marie don’t really like each other. All you and she saw in each other was a surface appearance, the glamorous babe and the dashing captain. You certainly don’t enjoy each other’s presence or conversation. You can’t spend an evening at home. You and she must go out every night and spend money just to keep busy. Slowing down would mean facing each other and the fact that you both entered into a hasty marriage that never should have happened in the first place.

In other words, thank God I was too afraid of those sorority girls to get involved with one when she thought I was something I wasn’t.

Marie knows exactly what she wants in life, to go out on dates, drink, eat, party, be merry and have fun, to enjoy being a hot babe every man in the room wants to be seen with. In this she is not unsympathetic. Virginia Mayo was only 25 in 1946, young and movie star beautiful with the emphasis on young. The 37-year-old Dana Andrews comes off like a sour, unpleasant, middle-aged man exploiting a younger woman and trying to keep her under lock and key when she rebels against his controlling personality and abusive ways. It’s a pretty typical fate for a man who marries a woman a decade younger than he is. She still wants to go out and party. He wants to stay home and go to bed early. Hello Leo DiCaprio. But while Dana Andrews is 37-years-old, Fred Derry is still in his mid-20s, just a naïve young man who made a bad decision because he was thinking with the wrong head, something all young men do, and doesn’t deserve to be punished for the rest of his life just because he wanted a few weeks of good sex before going off to die over Berlin.

Enter Peggy Stephenson, Al Stephenson’s daughter. While Marie is a hard, brassy, working-class woman who has to get by on her looks, Peggy is a proper upper-class young lady. Played by Teresa Wright of Maplewood, New Jersey, a posh socially progressive town where I once worked as a golf caddie in their local country club, Peggy is well-educated, sensitive, and patriotic. She accepts Fred not in spite of the fact that he’s a homeless veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder, but because he’s a homeless veteran suffering from post traumatic stress disorder. Fred, who needs a mother to help him heal from the war, and Peggy, who loves being a healer and caretaker, may not love each other, but they need each other. What’s more, they genuinely enjoy each other’s company. Peggy visits Fred at the drug store, where he’s able to be himself and tell someone what he really thinks of the cheap cosmetics he has to sell. They go to lunch and almost forget the time. Peggy and her rich boyfriend go out on a double date with Fred and Marie and we known damn well that if it were the 1960s they’d immediately wife swap. Marie wants to date Peggy’s rich preppy date as much as Fred wants to date Peggy. Peggy not only knows Fred is poor and works at a low status job, she relishes the idea of helping him work his way up in the world. Quite simply, the proper young lady and the damaged war hero are meant to be together.

In 2024 of course divorce is no big deal. In 1946 it was. William Wyler’s brilliance is in showing us the dialectical nature of social change, how the war and the economic mobilization that accompanied it not only wiped out the Great Depression, but opened up the country to a kind of social liberalism that will eventually be crushed by the McCarthy years but for a brief moment let people of all classes and status find the place they deserve. Al Stephenson is initially outraged that his daughter has fallen for a “smooth operator” like Fred Derry but it doesn’t matter. Peggy is her own woman and is going to do what she wants anyway. Indeed, while Al’s transition to civilian life is far less jarring than Fred’s or Homers, the progressive liberalism of his two grown children is a challenge to his traditional WASP, bourgeoisie ways. After giving his son a samurai sword and a flag he took “from a dead Jap” the son is horrified by his father’s racism and instead wants to talk about Hiroshima. The younger man is not thrilled by Truman’s war crime. Indeed, there’s more regret about the bombing of Hiroshima in 5 minutes Wyler’s 1946 film than there is all of Christopher Nolan’s bloated, overrated Oppenheimer. In 1946 Americans were satisfied that they had beaten German and Japanese fascism, but they by no means believed they were completely innocent.

As Fred Derry continues to fall into a greater and greater sense of despair over his lack of prospects and unhappy marriage, he gets more and more abusive towards Marie. What’s more, after a halfhearted talking to by his future father in law Al Stephenson, he gets violent, not to Marie, but to a man who half invites it but certainly doesn’t deserve it. When Homer pays Fred a visit at work, he’s suddenly approached by a middle-aged man who notices the hooks where his hands used to be. We first expect him to say something like “thank you for your service” but instead the man, an America Firster who gives off hints he’s an actual Nazi, harangues Homer about how he lost his hands for nothing. “We fought the wrong people,” he rants, “just become some commie radicals in Washington got too big for their britches.” When Fred politely requests he leave, the harangues Fred and the idea of social mobility the war provided. “You see. Now every soda jerk in the country thinks he’s someone.” The man is not violent. He’s not really even abusive but he is an irritating pain in the ass harassing a gravely wounded veteran with no hands. When he goes to pay his bill, and Homer follows him, wanting to continue the discussion, he repeats what he had said before, that Homer lost his hands for nothing and that we shouldn’t have taken sides with the Soviet Union against the Nazis. Fred has heard enough. He leaps over the counter, punches the man in the face, then throws him into a glass cabinet, knocking him out.

Fred is once again an anti-fascist hero but this time he hasn’t returned from a suicide mission over Berlin. He’s beaten up a middle-aged man for expressing an opinion. Like a teenage anarchist in a black mask he’s gotten off on punching a Nazi. If we are perceptive and not blindly jingoistic, we realize watching this scene how we have been manipulated by our government and our media for the last few decades. The social mobility and economically progressive agenda of the New Deal are long gone and whatever Bernie Sanders tells you they’re not going to return. But the cheap high of punching a Nazi — or even just an isolationist with a few suspect right wing views — is still here to be dangled in front of us every time our rulers want to go to war. Every world leader or people the the American ruling class want to get rid of has become Hitler. The Soviet Union? “Totalitarian” like Hitler. North Korea? Hitler. The Serbs in the 1990s? Hitler. Saddam? Hitler. Assad? Hitler. The Islamic extremists the CIA used to stir up violence in Kosovo and destroy Syria and Libya? Hitler. The Palestinians in Gaza? You guessed it. Hitler.

William Wyler may have been a strong supporter of the war but he sees the danger that a lot of Americans like Fred were in. If a soldier doesn’t get his life together after the war, find some purpose, then he risks holding onto the war for the rest of his life. What’s worse, he might become a destructive influence on the country he supposedly fought to protect. The Frei Korps in Germany, the American Legion, the Black and Tans, Gladio, even the persistent urge in Russia to see the world through the lens of World War II, there are many examples of even a victorious war making it impossible for a people to move on with their lives and build a better society.

Fortunately, for Fred Derry, there is redemption. After getting fired from his job at the drug store, he decides to leave town so as not to cause Al Stephenson any more grief. Marie demands a divorce, something he gladly agrees to. He says goodbye to his parents, who suddenly realize what they are losing. But when he arrives at the airport — where he’s given a ticket by a clerk played by Sean Penn’s father — Fred notices hundreds of demobilized B-17s. Initially believing they’re going to be junked, he feels cynical and hopeless. I suppose the junk man gets everyone in the end, he says to a salvage foreman. But when the foreman informs Fred that the planes aren’t going to be junked but recycled into materials to make new houses, Fred suddenly realizes that he too might be recycled back into civilian life. When he realizes the foreman is a fellow veteran, he asks him for a job, and in spite of having no experience, he’s given one. Fred may not have found his calling, but at the very least he’s found a job he can stand working for a fellow veteran. At Homer’s wedding, he meets Peggy. She’s happy to see him, even more happy he’s found a job, and even happier yet that his wife has given him a divorce. Life is going to be tough for awhile, he says, but eventually it will get better. She expresses her wish to share Fred’s misery. She doesn’t care about money. He doesn’t care about glamor. They accept each other for who they are. We are confident they will be happy together, two members of what Tom Brokaw would call the greatest generation. It’s just too bad Fred and Peggy will probably end up voting for Nixon and supporting the war in Vietnam and eventually in their old age Reagan and George W. Bush.

Homer Parrish, however, will probably stick to the progressive faith of the New Deal. Harold Russell, the young non-actor who played Homer, and who won two Oscars for his performance, did not continue as a professional actor. Instead he went to graduate school at Boston University and received a masters degree. Eventually he ended up heading an organization for disabled veterans. When President Truman fired Douglas MacArthur, Russell wrote a letter supporting him and affirming civilian control of the military. The American Legion denounced him, but he stood his ground.

As head of AMVETS, Russell wrote to President Truman in 1951 supporting his decision to dismiss General Douglas MacArthur during the Korean War. Russell’s telegram to Truman cited MacArthur’s “repeated insubordination in violation of basic American principles governing civil versus military authority.” His telegram asserted that those were “obvious grounds” to relieve MacArthur. Erle Cocke, Jr., commander of the American Legion, said that he was “shocked by the news” that AMVETS and the American Veterans Committee supported MacArthur’s firing.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_Russell

Harold Russell died in 2002 at the age of 88 after having spent almost 60 years with his horrific disability. Sadly he began to run out of money at the end of his life and had to sell his Best Supporting Actor statue to provide for his wife’s medical expenses. We live in that kind of a country. The New Deal is long gone, replaced by a voracious yet vacuous neoliberalism. Harold Russell was no John Wayne. He did not profit from the War that made him famous. He didn’t grandstand. He was not a glamorous hero, just an ordinary man who paid a heavy price to defeat Hitler and Japanese fascism and who later stood his ground supporting a democratically elected President against an egotist. For that he deserves to be remembered. What’s more the deep focus, black and white photography of The Best Years of Our Lives hint at a nobility that seems gone from the United States. Every frame could be a Life Magazine still photo, the Midwest — actually Southern California standing in for the Midwest — clean, sharp, full of promise, looking towards a future we no longer seem to believe in. Sadly our ruling class will still invoke the Harold Russells and Fred Derrys of the past to justify the rapacious, unjust wars of the present.