Week before last, twelve out of eighteen of the New York Film Crities named Samuel Goldwyn's "The Best Years of Our Lives" as the best moving picture of 1946 and oscared William Wyler, it director, for the best job of movie direction of the past year. In the 1946 film field, foreign entries such as "Henry V," "Brief Encounter," "Open City," and "The Well-Digger's Daughter" far outdistanced the general run of American film productions in artistic excellence. Most U. S. films seem to suffer from a Hollywood occupational disease that can best be described as a sugary phoniness, a candied insincerity. "The Best Years of Our Lives," it is pleasing to report, is a notable exception to the rule and a very fine picture.

"Best Years" deals with the readjustment problems of three veterans returning to civilian life. Frederic March, as the banker turned 25th Division infantry sergeant, returns to "Boone City" (Cincinnati) to resume the interrupted pattern of his life with his wife Milly, played by Myrna Loy. Coming back, March takes an airplane ride with Dana Andrews, an AAF captain returning to a Boone City soda fountain, and Harold Russell, an ex-sailor who has a couple of steel hooks where his elbows end. As vice-president in charge of small loans, March finds it difficult and against his nature to insist on "bankers' collateral" on every loan he makes to ex-servicemen. Russell finds the sledding tough and believes that his sympathetic parents and girlfriend have only pity for his plight. Andrews runs into trouble--with a floozy boomtown bride, with his soda-jerk job, and with March's young daughter, played by Teresa Wright, with whom he falls in love. All this adds up to considerable difficulty, and it takes Goldwyn & Co. exactly 163 minutes of screen time to wind the show up happily.

The camera technique of "Best Years" is, without exception, of high excellence--as in the shots of America, seen through the plexiglass of a hedge-hopping Army bomber, in the pictures of the vast airplane graveyard, and in the close-ups of the film's characters. Equally impressive are the fine performances given by all who take part in the production; March and Andrews are especially good. This reviewer would have enjoyed the picture a bit more if it had featured Russell's psychological, rather than mechanical, triumph over his artificial hands, and if, in another scene, it had met a bigot's intolerance with an argument instead of a punch. But these are are minor imperfections in a picture whose freshness and sincerity are as warmly satisfying as a cigarette after breakfast.