One hardly needs any adjective to describe the quality of a film that bags seven Academy Awards including those for best picture, director, actor, supporting actor, editing and screenplay. William Wyler’s 1946 drama about WW II veterans’ home coming is hailed till this day as unmatched source of entertainment as well as food for silent and civilizing reflection.

The Best Years of Our Lives is quintessentially about a notion of returning, a motif that finds itself unfolding in many layers throughout the course of the film. The plot primarily deals with the three male protagonists, played by Fredrick march, Harold Russell and Dana Andrews, different from one other in terms of socio-economic class, backgrounds, age, and occupation discovering the impediments in the process of returning back and carrying on with their lives they left before the War. The film here indeed evolves into a masterpiece with Wyler’s sincere look at the situation who himself spent the War years shooting documentaries on location and was on a similar plane as the protagonists.

One of the most outstanding features of the film is definitely the cinematography which makes it a celebrated film even for today’s audience. With Greg Toland behind the lenses, William Wyler used techniques such as long takes and deep focus photography to present an inimitable idea of realism which caught the attention of movie buffs, theorists, critics and scholars equally all over the world, the most prominent among them being French theorist Andre Bazin.