The Best Years of Our Lives (William Wyler, Samuel Goldwyn Productions, 1946) follows three World War II servicemen, Army sergeant Al Stephenson (Fredric March), Army Air Corps captain and bombardier Fred Derry (Dana Andrews), and Navy seaman Homer Parrish (Harold Russell), returning home after the war, returning to “civilization, after being in the jungle, with savages.” During the flight home, as Homer sleeps, Al and Fred have a quiet exchange regarding their fears of returning home, “nervous out of the service,” and what it means to be “rehabilitated.” Both agree that rehabilitation depends on a successful marriage, which means not only finding love with a woman but also achieving economic stability through work. The rehabilitation that seems possible for middle-class Al and working-class Fred, both of whom are able-bodied, seems less possible for Homer, who lost both hands during the war and has been outfitted with prosthetic hooks. In contrast with Homer's physical disability, explicitly cued in the film, available for viewer comprehension, the mental trauma experienced by Homer and Fred is implicitly cued, unspoken but expressed through style, available for viewer interpretation. Comprehending and interpreting the cues reveals that the film functions to demythologize white male veterans by removing the prosthesis of myth—the myth of the invincible American warrior—to expose the historical truth of their physical disability and mental trauma, explicitly and implicitly.

With the theme of rehabilitation in mind, this chapter argues that Wyler rehabilitates the narrative structure and style of The Best Years of Our Lives in the interest of prioritizing the truth of traumatic history over the compensatory prosthesis of myth by committing to the verisimilitude of “reborn realism” identified by French critic André Bazin. Reborn realism aims to achieve in the appearances onscreen the ambiguity and irresolution of meaning associated with reality, rather than the melodramatic clarity and mythical resolution of meaning conventional of classical Hollywood cinema.

In terms of rehabilitating narrative structure, Wyler engages a multiplefocus character following-pattern that has Homer's single-focus presence disrupting the dual-focus paralleling and contrasting of middle-class Al and working-class Fred, thwarting the mythical resolution of binary contradictions conventional of classical Hollywood cinema. The rehabilitation of all three protagonists remains ambiguous and open to interpretation, with contradictions of meaning evolving dialectically in history rather than resolving in Hollywood's melodramatic myth.