, about the 1946 blockbuster that influenced the way we talk about PTSD. She's also the author of Rewrite Man: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Warren Skaaren (2017) and Chainsaws, Slackers, and Spy Kids: Thirty Years of Filmmaking in Austin, Texas, which won the 2012 Peter C. Rollins Book of the Year Award. She holds a PhD in film history and taught for more than 20 years at the University of Texas at Austin, Texas State University, Austin Community College and the Austin Museum of Art. A former film critic, she currently works as a freelance writer and ghostwriter and lives in Austin with her husband and son.
Macor applied the “Page 99 Test” to Making The Best Years of Our Lives and reported the following:
Page 99 in Making The Best Years of Our Lives concludes a discussion about the filming of one of the emotional high points of the movie: the nighttime kitchen sequence between the handless veteran Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) and his girlfriend Wilma Cameron (Cathy O’Donnell). It is a pivotal moment in the couple’s relationship, which has been fraught ever since Homer returned from the war. The mood of the scene is complex, with elements of film noir, melodrama, and even horror in the way it is framed, lit, shot, and scored. The sequence actually starts in the kitchen and ends in Homer’s second-floor bedroom. As I write in this section, it is one of the movie’s most important sequences, and it features the production’s least experienced actors.Visit Alison Macor's website.
This particular page takes the reader through the filming of the bedroom portion of the sequence, from its complicated lighting setups to screenwriter Robert Sherwood’s screen direction. It also describes how the sequence was shot to comply with the directives from the Production Code Administration’s Breen Office, the industry’s self-censorship organization run at the time by Joseph Breen.
This section describes how director William Wyler worked with his actors on the emotionally charged scene: “Wyler was patient with Russell and O’Donnell throughout the filming of the sequence, aware that he was asking a lot of the most inexperienced actors in the Best Years ensemble. While O’Donnell struggled to convey a certain amount of impatience with Homer during the kitchen conversation, Russell downplayed his emotions too much in an effort to express Homer’s reticence and vulnerability. ‘Not acting,’ scribbled the script clerk on take after take.”
Page 99 also reveals how the Breen Office had flagged the sequence’s final moments, which include a kiss between the unmarried couple in a bedroom at night. “Before the fade-out . . . it should be clearly indicated that Wilma is about to leave the room,” Breen wrote of the scene in the first version of the script.
I think this page offers a pretty great snapshot of the book as a whole. If readers were to flip to this while browsing through the book, they would get a sense of how Making Best Years combines behind-the-scenes detail about the production and release of the movie with insight into its key players and what they brought to the project. The brief background on the Breen Office’s response to the scene in the script and their warnings about how it should be handled also offers industrial context for Hollywood circa 1946, when Best Years was filmed, something I do throughout the book.
I have to admit I was holding my breath as I turned to page 99 for this test, but I am delighted that it includes this important scene. It is quite possibly my favorite sequence in the entire film.
--Marshal Zeringue
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