So this is the next movie up on the AFI list podcast, and I wasn’t looking forward to it, because I knew it was about veterans coming back from WW2, and like… I’ve seen those movies, they’re always grim things like The Deer Hunter, about people not able to handle it and becoming alcoholics and then joining Russian roulette leagues. But it turns out that this is about WW2, not Vietnam, and it’s a lot better than I was expecting.

Which isn’t to say that it doesn’t have any darkness, because it certainly does. The movie was released in 1946, in a time when lots of people knew what it was like to return from war. Its director had enlisted to make war documentaries, had been in battles, and knew plenty of soldiers. And so the movie is realistic about the problems returning soldiers faced. One of them drinks too much, one wakes up with nightmares, one of them has a hard time finding a job, all of them find that their relationships present new challenges, one lost his hands and now has to live amongst people who find that scary and off-putting.

There are also more subtle difficulties, like: A sergeant comes back to his job as a well-off banker, but a captain comes back and ends up working as a soda jerk — the dynamics of social status in that situation require some adjustment, to go from being (as the character puts it) “an officer and a gentleman” to making sundaes and sandwiches.

But what the movie does is… shows people dealing with their troubles, in the messy and imperfect ways that people do. Despite one scene in which a character looks down the barrel of a gun, nobody here ends up killing himself. People do find jobs, even if they’re not good ones; the people in the handless guy’s life get used to it; the drinking guy mostly keeps it under control most of the time; some of the relationships work out well, and others flame out entirely. By the end of the movie, maybe everyone isn’t quite where they expected or hoped to be, but they’re in a place where they can see the contours of their settled civilian life stretching ahead of them. Which, y’know, these are the people who go and settle the suburbs and raise a generation of kids through sepia-tinted midcentury boom years, so yeah, sounds about right.

So the movie surprised me a bit by not being as hopeless as I expected, but what surprised me even more was reading about it afterward. Apparently it was massively popular — the highest-grossing film of the decade, in the top 10 highest-grossing of all time when it was released, and even today still in the top 100 inflation-adjusted. Besides the massive popular acclaim, it also won seven Oscars, plus an extra honorary one. (The guy who lost his hands wasn’t a professional actor, he was a real soldier; he got nominated for a supporting actor role, but as nobody thought he would win, they gave him an honorary Oscar for being courageous and inspiring or whatever shit… but then he won the real one anyway.)

Massively award-winning, massively popular, actually pretty good… and I’d barely even heard of it before now. I can’t say it’s been forgotten, because like, it is on this AFI list, so clearly someone is thinking about it. But still surprising all the same. I wonder if maybe it’s because of the lack of big stars? (Myrna Loy as one of the returning soldiers’ wives is probably the biggest name in the movie.)

Anyway, I’m not going to say anyone should rush out and see this movie, but it is solidly made and if you’re going through the AFI list, you’re gonna hit a lot of movies that are worse, so lightly recommended.