Making The Best Years of Our Lives: The Hollywood Classic That Inspired a Nation

Alison Macor has written a thoughtful and meticulously researched book that documents the fascinating production history of this groundbreaking film while also exploring its cultural, industrial, and social contexts. It will be appreciated by all readers who are drawn to in-depth studies of classic Hollywood films, as well as those interested in disability rights, veterans' issues, war and social problem films, and the postwar American film industry.

In her compulsively readable, meticulously researched, and altogether elegant reappraisal of The Best Years of Our Lives, a towering Hollywood classic that many regard as William Wyler’s most enduring cinematic achievement, Alison Macor offers a veritable model of accessible, public-facing scholarship. She chronicles in rich detail the film’s fascinating production history, the deep personal connection it had to its director, and the remarkable resonance that the picture struck with movie-going audiences in its day and continues to strike in us three quarters of a century later.

More than seventy-five years after it was first released, William Wyler’s film The Best Years of Our Lives remains the beating heart of American cinema. No other movie ever made has proved more powerful, honest, and intimate about the struggles of ordinary people, returning military veterans and their families, in the aftermath of the great cataclysm that was World War II. Alison Macor’s meticulously researched and carefully written account covers all the important ground in the making of this masterwork, from its origins as a blank-verse novel to the selection of the superb cast and crew and the extraordinary and at times painful artistry that went into every creative decision. She is especially alert to the authenticity and compassion that two wounded veterans—the director Wyler and the first-time actor Harold Russell, whose hands were blown off in a training accident—brought to the project.