Interestingly, Robert Warshow — most famous for his genre-spawning essay “The Gangster as Tragic Hero” — hated The Best Years of Our Lives. This look back doesn’t really capture his page-after-page irritation…
The inevitable backlash wasn’t long in coming. Writing in the Partisan Review while the movie was still being shown in neighborhood theaters, Robert Warshow denounced it for its “denial of the reality of politics,” by which he meant that it reduced widespread postwar problems to matters of individual psychology that could be solved by the application of good old-fashioned American virtues (hard work, patience, cheerfulness, and the like). Though Warshow was practically the only naysayer, his point of view came to prevail in informed circles; by 1957, when Manny Farber, writing in Commentary, dismissed The Best Years of Our Lives as “a horse-drawn truckload of liberal schmaltz,” he was telling his readers something they felt they already knew. (Then as now, the only ones more disdainful of liberal ideals than conservatives were those on the extreme left.)
Skepticism is the critic’s stock in trade, but I think we’ve become so used to feeling manipulated by movies that we instinctively distrust one that stirs something real in us. Seeing The Best Years of Our Lives again last year, in the aftermath of the media blitz that surrounded the September 11 observances (and amid vague new terrorism alerts and the prospect of war with Iraq), filled me with regret that today’s popular culture responds to our current predicament only in ways that seem crass—witness the many commemorative books for which 9/11 represented both a marketing opportunity and a sell-by date—or, worse, ineffectual. Popular music was the first responder, and the most anticipated and publicized album was Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising. Talk about a truckload of liberal schmaltz.
