Favorite Best Picture Oscar winners 1940-1949

It's a toss-up for me between CASABLANCA and BEST YEARS. Love them both for different reasons. I do think that BEST YEARS is one of the greatest American films ever made. But then again, I would say the same about CASABLANCA. But there's just something just a little more profoundly relevant about BEST YEARS, I think, carrying as it does the weight of the war into the film through the wartime experiences of its director, writers, actors, and even Myrna Loy, among, I'm sure, others.

Can't help myself, now you've got me going about THE BEST YEARS OF OUR LIVES: first, it was written as a novella by novelist MacKinlay Kantor, who was a war correspondent during the war. It was then adapted to the screen by playwright/screenwriter Robert E. Sherwood, who served as the Director of the Office of War Information from 1943 until the end of the war.

Director William Wyler volunteered from 1942 to1945 to serve as a Major in the U.S. Army Air Forces and directed a pair of documentaries: The Memphis Belle: A Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), about a Boeing B-17 and its crew, and Thunderbolt! (1947), highlighting a P-47 fighter bomber squadron in the Mediterranean.

Wyler filmed The Memphis Belle at great personal risk, flying over enemy territory on actual bombing missions in 1943. On one flight, he lost consciousness from lack of oxygen. His cinematographer Harold J. Tannenbaum, a First Lieutenant, was shot down and died during the filming. Working on Thunderbolt! Wyler was exposed to such loud noise that he passed out. When he awoke, he found he was deaf in one ear. Partial hearing with the aid of a hearing aid eventually came back years later. Wyler returned from the War a disabled veteran.

Harold Russell lost both hands in 1944 when he was an Army instructor training pilots in North Carolina, and a defective fuse detonated an explosive he was handling while making a training film, resulting in him receiving two hooks to serve as hands.

Myrna Loy, at the outbreak of the War, all but abandoned her acting career to focus on the war effort and work closely with the Red Cross. She was so outspoken against Hitler that her name appeared on his blacklist. She also helped run a Naval Auxiliary canteen and toured frequently to raise funds.

All that, added to the facts that the war ended on 9/2/1945, and the film was made during 1945/46 and premiered on 11/21/1946 certainly gave it a sense of immediacy to the audiences who had lived through the war shortly before. (I believe it has that same immediacy for those who see it today, even if they don't understand why.)

That said, CASABLANCA has the immediacy of being filled with a multitude of actors who fled the Nazis to save their lives. Still, it's more of a "Hollywood" movie in many ways - though, I still believe a great one.