Hollywood’s Golden Age is generally defined as the period between the advent of the “talkies” (with The Jazz Singer in 1927) and the early-to-mid 1960s, when the major studios were producing historical epics, hallucinogenic musicals, and other big-budget extravaganzas that appealed to the widest possible audiences. Some buffs might argue for Gone with the Wind, others could counter with Singin’ in the Rain, and a third cohort lobby for Citizen Kane, but I’ve long thought the one movie that best exemplifies this Golden Age is The Best Years of Our Lives.

Directed by William Wyler, whose elegant contributions to the Hollywood canon are too numerous to mention, the story follows three veterans returning from World War II, and although it is fiction, the movie, arriving in theatres in 1946, documents postwar America at the same moment the era was taking shape. Distinct from any number of worthy social dramas, Best Years embodies the spirit of its own times.

The war has been won but at a terrible cost. The men who paid the price are introduced in the opening sequences; the revelation that sailor Homer Parrish (Harold Russell) has hooks where his hands used to be is a jolt, but the audience suspects the two other main characters, played by Frederic March and Dana Andrews, are themselves suffering from less apparent wounds. We’ll soon find out what they are.

The effect of their wartime experience on those closest to them creates a layer of tension in the picture. The bitterness Homer takes pains to bury is a strain on his mother, father, and long-time girlfriend. The March character’s demeanor provokes a fretfulness in his wife, played by Myrna Loy, anxious over exactly what kind of husband has returned to her. He’s distracted, detached from her and the children he once held so dear, and drinking to cockeyed drunkenness. The anguish he suffers, his guilt over making it home alive when hundreds of thousands of comrades did not, is a component of what was once called shellshock or battle fatigue. Today we’d recognize these symptoms as PTSD. The same is true of the nightmarish flashbacks the Andrews character suffers.

After years of churning out wartime propaganda pictures that alternated with escapist fluff—think the Andy Hardy vehicles that starred Mickey Rooney—American audiences were braced for solemn reflection and realistic treatment of social issues. With the economy ramping down, what were returning veterans supposed to do for work? Andrews’ airman flew combat missions during the war. Brought up with nothing on the literal wrong side of the tracks (a train whistle blows through the soundtrack), after a brief interlude of glory he goes back home to nothing. Unlike March’s banker, he has no executive job to resume, and swaps out his bomber jacket for the apron of the soda jerk he was before the war. He doesn’t have much of a choice.

In the postwar years a persistent undercurrent of disillusion shot through the nation’s political discourse. Cynical Hitler apologists remained convinced that America had defeated the wrong enemy, and a confrontation with one of these types ends with Andrews’ fountain jockey knocking the man through a glass display case before ripping off his apron and stomping off the job. Standing up for himself and for the fallen, it’s no coincidence that the bomber jacket reappears in the next scene, as the character, Captain Fred Derry, feels his way toward true purpose and identity.

The characters share a common resolve. These men have come home after finishing some awful business, determined to do their utmost to build, or rebuild, their lives, their families, and their communities. There is little space and less time left over for any sort of self-absorbed anti-hero, a character who would sidle into popular culture soon enough, but that is a figure we’ll dissect on another day.

Homer, Captain Derry, and March’s Al Stephens share binding ties: respect and appreciation and love. What’s isolating Al from his wife and children, however, is his love for those who made the ultimate sacrifice, one which cannot be requited. The veterans for whom he feels that love are gone. Al’s wounds won’t be bound, and he won’t have a chance of resuming his used-to-be civilian life, until he can redirect that love to the living.

Which he begins to do, through of all things, his job as a loan officer. Here his wartime heroism is transformed into a less dramatic kind of everyday valor. His decisions concerning risk trigger a major impact on the returning veterans lined up outside his office, and by extension on the economic stability of the country, and, we can safely say from a distance of nearly eighty years, on American history itself. Love illuminates the lives of others.

Shortly after landing stateside, Andrews’ Derry realizes that, compounding his other problems, he has nothing in common with the party girl who boxed him into a quickie marriage before he shipped out. They don’t want the same things. And she’s still partying. He’s vulnerable enough (and handsome enough) to attract the attention of Al’s daughter Peggy, played by Teresa Wright, who’d be hard to resist under ordinary circumstances; in the state Derry’s in, he doesn’t stand a chance against her charms.

Derry’s wife (Virginia Mayo) may be shallow and grasping, but the film has a big enough heart not to dismiss her. In her climatic argument with Derry—the husband she’s about to ditch—she wails, “I gave up the best years of my life [for you]” and if on the surface she’s referring to time lost  waiting for her husband to return from the war, time she couldn’t dedicate to her carefree, pleasure seeking lifestyle, in another interpretation, those “best years” were spent anticipating the fullness of a love she couldn’t measure up to. This heavy note of sadness—as if the movie needs any more of them—comes from a character the audience might want to hate but cannot. Feeling a twinge of compassion instead, we are drawn into a circle of love that expands to include the flawed and the failed, the desperate, the lonesome.

Swirling at the center of the film is the conflict between the courage required to accept love, and the cowardice it takes to reject it. A captain in the service, Derry outranks Homer Parrish. Wearing the bomber jacket as a symbol of his authority, Derry “orders” the disabled sailor to go home and tell his girlfriend the way he’s always felt about her, and then have the guts to act on it.  Homer must come to terms with himself and his external reality before he can admit the internal truth, which is that he has always loved the girl next door, and always will. The scene where that recognition plays out might be the most moving in a picture that’s packed with them. Truth and self-acceptance provide the gateway to hopeful, expectant love. Not only for Homer but for Derry and Stephens too.

The film ends with a wedding, the way a comedy in the classical theatre would—a time-honored salute to marriage as key to social stability. And a suggestion that the best years of these lives—and ours—are yet to come.