The Best Years of Our Lives

Released barely a year after the war ended, William Wyler's film asked the audience filling the seats a question nobody had put to them yet: what happens once the parade is over. Three servicemen come home to the same Midwestern town - an infantry sergeant who cannot stop drinking, a decorated bombardier reduced to a drugstore counter and a marriage to a stranger, and a sailor who lost both hands. Wyler, who had flown bombing missions and come back partly deaf, sugarcoats none of it: the shell shock, the unemployment, the disability handled without pity. Harold Russell, who plays the sailor, was a real veteran and double amputee with no acting training, and the Academy voted him an honorary award assuming he could not win - then he won Best Supporting Actor anyway. Seven Oscars.