YMMV / The Best Years of Our Lives

• Adaptation Displacement: This was originally a novella, Glory for Me, by MacKinley Kintor.
• Aluminum Christmas Trees: Our heroes come home to find the economy in recession, which might seem odd, since everyone tends to imagine the post-war years as being a time of great economic prosperity (the "baby boom" generation was a reference to both the giant uptick in births and the economic miracle that occurred at the same time). However, this is exactly what happened: the U.S. economy was in recession at the end of 1945 due to less government spending as the war ended, and in fact between the war's end and 1960 there were a total of six recessions. The post-war U.S. economy was not as stable as people tend to think.
• Award Snub:
  • Dana Andrews and Teresa Wright, despite playing characters whose romance provides one of the central storylines in the film, were ignored at the Oscars.
  • Long time Hollywood favourite Myrna Loy, consistently popular with critics and audiences, conspicuously went unnominated as well. People theorise that her role was too small for Best Actress, but that a star of her calibre couldn't be put as Best Supporting Actress. Therefore she never received any Oscar nominations throughout her career.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • Viewers love Peggy for being significantly more than The Ingenue or a Girl Next Door. Her Wise Beyond Her Years behaviour still clashing occasionally with her Adorkable youthful ignorance just endears her even more.
  • Out of the three leads, Homer is the one who gets the most love. He's an Iron Woobie who has all the film's most memorable scenes, and provides most of the Tear Jerkers. His actor Harold Russell was even awarded two Oscars because they didn't think he'd win the one he was nominated for.
• Ho Yay: Fred and Al end up drunkenly cuddling each other in the back of the car. Millie jokes that they make a lovely couple.
• Jerkass Woobie: Luella was incredibly insensitive when she led the neighbourhood kids to spy on Homer's hooks, but you absolutely feel for the poor girl after Homer's outburst. She's clearly feeling horrible about what just happened and Homer himself feels guilty over his outburst.
• Memetic Mutation: Al and Milly's reunion scene, including the two of them hugging in the background.
• Once Original, Now Common: While the film still has lots of artistic merit these days, it can be lost on modern audiences just how groundbreaking the subject matter was. Throughout the war, the general public had been bombarded by Frank Capra's Why We Fight films — glamorizing the war as a heroic and patriotic endeavor. This film was made with the intent to tell the public about how the soldiers had to readjust to mundane life after coming home. Fred, for example, was a decorated Captain, but since he came from poverty, he can only manage a minimum-wage job at a department store. Likewise, Al can no longer relate to his children after they grew up while he was away. While seen as a good source of drama today, the topics the film tackles were something a 1940s audience had never seen before. All Quiet on the Western Front was really the only other notable American project to really emphasise that War Is Hell up to that point — which is why it is still relevant today.
• Signature Scene:
  • Homer losing his temper with some kids trying to get a peek at his hooks, and breaking them through a window.
  • There's also Fred's Catapult Nightmare on his first night back, and Peggy reassuring him.
  • Fred walking through the Derelict Graveyard of stripped-down airplanes. The sheer size of the abandoned field becomes overwhelming.
• Unintentionally Sympathetic: It's hard not to feel sorry for Marie, given that she and Fred were a Fourth-Date Marriage and part of the reason she's so unhappy is because he's not letting her work. Yeah, she's having affairs, but she eventually calls for a divorce and frees Fred up to get with Peggy.
• Values Dissonance: To modern viewers, it can seem pretty odd how little attention Al's obvious alcoholism gets.
• Values Resonance: While not as universal as it used to be (virtually every American family with an able-bodied male had at least one, probably more family member who'd served in the war and returned home), the story of soldiers having trouble readjusting to their lives before the war still holds up, especially as the world they left is now different and they have to try and find their place in it — something that's not only still relevant today, it's even more relevant than it was at the time, with PTSD becoming a better understood phenomenon, a major topic in the news, and a matter in people's minds today as soldiers come home from Iraq and Afghanistan.
• The Woobie: All three of the veterans can qualify to a degree due to each of their lives permanently change after the war for the worst.
  • Fred Derry got broke in the war, and can no longer apply to his job he had before the war. And he barely spends any time with his wife anymore. Then there's his constant nightmares he gets from pleasant war memories.
  • Al Stephenson never got to be with his kids as they grew up, and can't relate to them as much as he used to, and he ended up becoming an alcoholic.
  • Homer's a special case since often switches between being a normal woobie and an Iron Woobie. He lost both of his hands in the war and had to get adjusted to wearing a pair of hooks, plus he isolated himself from his family and girlfriend, since he doesn't have the self-confidence he needs to encounter his family or found out they'd react to his hooks. But more than anything, he wants to be treated like a normal person.

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