For one of our recent dates, TYG took me to BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES (1946) which was playing at the Carolina Theatre here. It’s an excellent movie — I’d seen it before — but it’s also a good example of how film can capture the look of an era, a useful tool for writers as I’ve mentioned before.
The film, Hollywood’s biggest moneymaker of the decade, was the first to deal with returning veterans and a passion project for producer Sam Goldwyn and director William Wyler. The war is over and three veterans wind up on the same Army plane dropping them off at the Midwestern city where they live. Al (Fredric March) is a banker; Fred (Dana Andrews) is a former soda jerk; Homer (Harold Russell) was barely out of school and is coming home with prosthetic hooks instead of hands (Russell was a real paraplegic, which some people told Goldwyn would be too horrifying for audiences). Can they find jobs? Can Al pick up his two-decades of marriage to Milly (Myrna Loy) and his kids after several years away? What about Fred’s reunion with party-girl wife Virginia Mayo? Will Homer’s girl accept his disability?
It’s well worth seeing but what I’m talking about is what a window it makes into 1946. Not all of 1946, of course. It’s an all-white cast, there are no openly gay characters and so on. But even so, it shows a lot. The way ashtrays are everywhere because people smoked everywhere.
(That is, by the way, real life musician Hoagie Carmichael at the piano with Homer). The old, heavy lighters sitting on tables and desks in case someone needs to light up. What passed for swinging entertainment at night clubs. The degree to which getting staggering drunk was considered acceptable. The tiny kitchens, even in Al and Milly’s upscale apartment. Kids going to school in suit and tie. Women putting on gloves before going out. Women’s hats.
Even if you can’t find a movie for your era, there’s probably no shortage of photos, at least in the 20th century.
I didn’t think about film when I was writing Southern Discomfort but I may start looking at some stuff from the mid-1970s before Let No Man Put Asunder gets too far along. Can’t hurt.
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