Academy award winner in 1946 this film documents the bitterness, the disillusionment felt by returning veterans who came back to try and pick up their lives after the trauma of WW2. We follow three guys, one of whom lost both hands, who live in a typical town. The experiences they had overseas, the responsibilities, the magnitude of what they went through were all irrelevant now.
The film must have captured the zeitgeist of that time. Watched today it stings with the unfairness of it all. What was all that heroism, that suffering for?
The film isn't without flaws: cue music throughout grates today, an encounter with a war doubter is extremely clumsy, the sentimentality of the treatment of Harold Russell is overdone. Still...it's unforgettable. I haven't seen it for forty years and several scenes were fresh in my mind. It's an iconic relic of its time and will always be considered a classic of American cinema.
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