Production
Director William Wyler had flown combat missions over Europe in filming Memphis Belle (1944) and worked hard to get accurate depictions of the combat veterans he had encountered. Wheeler changed the original casting that had featured a veteran suffering from posttraumatic stress disorder and sought out Harold Russell, a non-actor to take on the exacting role of Homer Parrish.
For The Best Years of Our Lives, he asked the principal actors to purchase their own clothes, in order to connect with daily life and produce an authentic feeling. Other Wyler touches included constructing life-size sets, which went against the standard larger sets that were more suited to camera positions. The impact for the audience was immediate, as each scene played out in a realistic, natural way.
The movie began filming on April 15, 1946 at a variety of locations, including the Los Angeles County Arboretum and Botanic Garden, Ontario International Airport, Ontario, California, Raleigh Studios, Hollywood and the Samuel Goldwyn/Warner Hollywood Studios. Many scenes were also filmed in Phoenixville, PA, most notably the banking scenes using the Farmers and Mechanics Bank located on Main Street and various other scenes showing Bridge Street and Main Street in Phoenixville, PA. The Best Years of Our Lives is notable for cinematographer Gregg Toland's use of deep focus photography, in which objects both close to and distant from the camera are in sharp focus. For the passage of Fred Derry's reliving a combat mission while sitting in the remains of a former bomber, Wyler used "zoom" effects to simulate an aircraft's taking off.
The "Jackson High" football stadium seen early in the movie in aerial footage was Corcoran Stadium, the home of Xavier University's (Cincinnati) football team from 1929 to 1973.
After the war, the combat aircraft featured in the film were being destroyed and disassembled for reuse as scrap material. The scene of Derry's walking among aircraft ruins was filmed at the Ontario Army Air Field in Ontario, California. The former training facility had been converted into a scrap yard, housing nearly 2,000 former combat aircraft in various states of disassembly and reclamation.
Big-band jazz drummer Gene Krupa briefly appears in a montage of nightclub performers.
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—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)