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In treating the adjustments made by three American servicemen returning from World War II, The Best Years of Our Lives avoids both tear-jerking sentimentality and depressing domestic drama. It treats its audiences like adults, managing to be funny and touching and only just a little preachy, in the right proportions. It's still very much a film of its time: The returning veterans of Korea and Vietnam and Iraq and Afghanistan have faced very different problems, so it takes a bit of a sympathetic leap for contemporary audiences to fully appreciate what the film meant to a post-World War II audience. It has to be said that this was the year when two extraordinary foreign-language films, Children of Paradise and Open City, both made under the harshness of wartime conditions, were released and were eligible for Oscars. Either of them might have been my choice instead of The Best Years of Our Lives -- as my favorite Hitchcock film, Notorious, might also have been -- but I choose this time to go with the film that made the most direct impact on me.
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