Almost There: Myrna Loy in "The Best Years of Our Lives"
Thursday, June 10, 2021 at 2:00PM 
The 19th Academy Awards were, in some regard, a celebration of the war's end, a reckoning with its immediate consequences. We can see it in the embrace of European cinema, an industry rising from the ashes, with nods for films like the Italian Neorealist Rome, Open City, and the French poetry of Children of Paradise. American cinema, America itself, was also still reeling from its hard-won victory. The scars were fresh and bloody when William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives won the Best Picture Oscar. The production portrays the lives of three military men returning home after the war's end, traumatized and still recovering, adapting back to civilian life. It was the perfect champion for these postwar Oscars.
Nevertheless, not even the picture's awards success could spell away some of its performers' chronic bad luck when it came to movie awards. After decades as one of Hollywood's greatest stars, Myrna Loy still couldn't get herself an Oscar nomination…
Despite being first-billed, Myrna Loy isn't the star of The Best Years of Our Lives. Taking inspiration from his first-hand experiences of World War II and a novel by MacKinlay Kantor, William Wyler devised a collective view of the conflict's effects, both on its fighters and the home front. It's a weary picture that starts in limbo, between the battlefield and the comfort of family life, when countless soldiers wait in airports for a ride back home. It's here that we meet our three veteran protagonists. They are Dana Andrews' bombardier captain Fred Derry, Harold Russell's naval petty officer Homer Parrish, and Fredric March's infantry sergeant Al Stephenson. Loy plays Mrs. Stephenson, Milly, and she enters the picture around 20 minutes into the story. Regardless of its relative lateness, her character introduction is one of the film's most iconic scenes.
Instead of any shining close-ups announcing the arrival of the cast's biggest star, Wyler lets the camera remain away from his players. As Mr. Stephenson reenters his home, he shushes his children to surprise the wife who, out in another room, is heard before she's seen. Even when the camera finally shows us Loy, Milly has her back turned to us, hiding the moment when she understands what the strange silence that has fallen over the household means. Still, there's such clarity to Loy's body language that we can precisely pinpoint the moment of realization. The reunion and loving embrace are captured at a respectful distance, a wide shot that lets us see the trepidation in the wife's overwhelming joy. The way she hugs her husband, it's like Milly's afraid he might disappear at any moment.
After this welcoming, Wyler finally lets Loy take center stage, spreading the news of Al's return on the telephone. The breathless, fractured euphoria that the actress plays is a shattering thing to witness. It's a barrage of effervescent happiness mixed with weary relief, a touch of fearful disbelief, a whisper of awe. The heightened emotion is necessary to establish the character's devotion and resilience. From then on, Milly becomes something of the archetypal spouse character that exists at the margins of her companion's story. More than a focus of easy sentiment, her presence subsumes into a pragmatic backbone. She watchfully tries to preserve familial harmony in the face of irreversible change.
Al isn't the same man that left home to do battle on the Pacific front. The propensity for alcoholism, that might have been there before, has been doused by the gasoline of war. It's now grown into a mighty fire, threatening to consume everything and everyone around him. On the first night of boozy celebration, Loy allows us to see how Milly is used to handling her husband when he's drunk. At the same time, her concerned furtive looks and barely hidden smiles of self-amusement reveal how strongly the flame of homecoming glee still burns. Delight tempers concern, while a shadow of weariness grows larger and more difficult to ignore as the night unfolds. However, the sound of an old song is enough to summon the passions of youth.
Dancing, her eyes fill with unshed tears, a reflection of sorrow for what is lost to time and war. There's no time for indulgent self-pity, though. Al's disorderly euphoria quickly turns the dance into a grotesque cavalcade that's more humiliating than enchanting, especially as he seems to confuse his wife for some faraway extramarital conquest. One would expect devastation from Milly, but the actress chooses to ignore the potential crisis with a conspiratorial willingness to play along. In these instants of quasi-optimistic disappointment, we get to know who Milly was before the war so thoroughly transformed her life and love. For a star so often positioned at the center of her movies, Myrna Loy is incredibly adept at changing course and actressing on the edges of her film. Beyond Milly's necessary peripheralization in The Best Years of Our Lives' trifurcated narrative, William Wyler's directorial approach throws further challenges at Loy.
This might be a prestige drama made during an era of big studio hegemony, but the usual artifice of Hollywood glamour is mostly absent from its construction. The nihilistic posturing of film noir cynicism is also avoided in favor of a more direct and startlingly modern frankness. One may see such decisions in form and casting as well as text and tone. Russell was a real veteran, an untrained actor with multiple amputations who Wyler treasured for his raw natural presence on-screen. Gregg Toland's cinematography, where the softness of beauty shots is excised, makes way for deep-focus staging where simultaneous actions and reactions reign supreme. Sometimes, the amount of visual information is so mountainous it becomes upsetting, putting us in the shoes of characters for whom the banal quotidian can be an unsurmountable monster.
Such a significant pursuit of expressive realism comes to affect as unsuspecting aspects of filmmaking as the costumes. Instead of modeling a star's wardrobe, Myrna Loy purchased her clothes with a small budget Wyler allotted her. These creative decisions demand lived-in characterizations whose specificity goes beyond tuny line-readings or carefully curated close-ups. A big part of Loy's performance is how Milly moves through the domestic space, often in the background, how she maneuvers and negotiates the interests of the different family members, how she tries to control Al's drinking without calling attention to her efforts. That's not to say Loy doesn't get a chance or two to inject some of her usual charms into the picture, her known skill with light humor and hints of romantic playfulness. Something as simple as an eavesdropped phone call can add a splendid shot of comedic wit.
Those morsels of luminous interplay only serve to make the darkness of the material more painful to witness. A formal celebration in honor of Al becomes an excruciating spectacle of swallowed-up dread, Loy charging every forced smile with an electric current of anxiety. Afterward, while confronting her lovesick daughter, Milly reveals the hard work of a functional marriage, confessing how her relationship with Al is far from idyllic idealizations. In such passages, Loy embodies her movie's willingness to look past the veneer of postwar normalcy and see straight into the pulp of bruised hearts and broken psyches that exist beneath the surface. It's not necessarily radical or revolutionary work, but it's mighty impressive nonetheless, powerful and affecting with a glimmer of hope at the end.
To explain why Myrna Loy didn't receive an Oscar nomination for such exquisite work requires acknowledging the category confusion that plagued her awards bid. As the first-billed star with considerable fame, it's unlikely Loy would have been campaigned as a supporting player, forcing her into a much more competitive lead actress race. While I would have placed her in the other Oscar category, I must concede that Loy got closer to a Best Actress nomination than a more appropriate Best Supporting Actress nod. AMPAS still chose to look the other way, recognizing five other women instead. They were Olivia de Havilland in To Each His Own, Celia Johnson in Brief Encounter, Jennifer Jones in Duel in the Sun, Rosalind Russell in Sister Kenny, and Jane Wyman in The Yearling. De Havilland won, and Russell, whose film was otherwise ignored, was probably the most vulnerable nominee and would have been likely left aside in case of a Myrna Loy nomination.
The Best Years of Our Lives is available to stream on Kanopy, DirecTV, Pluto TV, and TCM. You can also rent it from many services.
Reader Comments (24)
Category confusion and internal competition must have played a role in her omission. As Claudio stated, she was first billed and no doubt was campaigned as lead. Her screen daughter, Teresa Wright, was lower billed but has more screen time and her character has more agency to the plot. Wright may have been campaigned as supporting, but she had just won that category not long ago and some voters may have voted her as lead as her graduation to bigger roles (tragically those roles didn't happen- thanks for that Sam Goldwyn) Loy's character with less screen time seems more appropriate in supporting, but major stars weren't going in that category yet and she wasn't old enough to get the veteran nomination. Both Loy and Wright were worthy of nominations- they are better then 4 of the supporting nominees that year. The actress nominees that year were considered due (De Haviland overdue for win, Russell with a kind of comeback) in films that were hits or had lots of attention (Jones and Wyman) or critical darlings (Johnson) It would be hard to crack that group.
Myrna Loy should have absolutely been nominated for this and The Thin Man. I think, Celia Johnson aside, Loy is easily finer than any of the other women nominated and surely her film was more notable than any of the five movies in that category. Considering how huge of a star she was, it's really bizarre to me that some sort of "career nom" never happened. The Best Years of Our Lives would seemingly have been a no-brainer in that regard given the film's success overall. It's kind of crazy actually given that it won two acting awards in other categories. I guess she's backgrounded quite a bit but still it strikes me as a bit odd. The Thin Man was also a best picture nominee and while the acting categories aligned with best picture inconsistently in those days, it still hurts to see Norma Shearer and Grace Moore over Loy.
The OTHER weird omission in 1946 is Ingrid Bergman for Notorious. They clearly saw and liked the movie, she was getting nominations practically thrown at her around that time and she was one of the biggest and most beloved stars in the world and received rave reviews for the performance.
I think Jennifer Jones stinks this particular race up.
It’s mind boggling she was never nominated. I love her so much.
I'm sure Myrna Loy was submitted as a Lead Actress, and even if she had been submitted as Supporting Actress, there would have been cries of "Foul!" that an above-the-title actress was "slumming". I think the really great Supporting Actress in Best Years of Our Lives was Cathy O'Donnell who always brought a lovely presence to everything she did. As for Lead Actress, Celia Johnson and Jane Wyman are heads above the other three, and like Peter, I think Ingrid Bergman's omission for Notorious is the most baffling. Truly a great performance.
Loy alwas was good and this is one of her best performances.
I think Wyman has the weakest performance, but Bergman deserved the nomination.
The female characters in The Best Years of Our Lives are really underdeveloped. The roles played by the ultimate nominees in the Best Actress categories are much more substantial. Loy's best chance would have been in any of her movies with William Powell, most likely the original Thin Man movie.
Man, that is a great film. I saw as a Blind Spot either last year or 2 years ago but I was enamored with Myrna Loy's performance as I'm now stunned to realize she didn't get nominated. Man, that's some fucking bullshit.
Myrna Loy is a classic that will live on forever despite being an 'Almost There'. The same is true of Claudio, although when he moves on and breaks big he will surely get 'There'.
Kael, Ebert, Alves.
I don't think it would have ever even occurred to anyone at the time to submit Loy as a supporting candidate. She was still a very big star and - as you noted - was top billed in the film.
1946 was one of those years when my Best Actress nominees would have been completely different from the five the Academy chose. And Loy, good as she is in "The Best Years of Our Lives" wouldn't have made my list either. As you suggested, luck was against her when it came to awards; her best performances seemed to come during particularly competitive years.
My '46 nominees
Joan Crawford "Humoresque"
Judy Garland "The Harvey Girls"
Dorothy McGuire "Till the End of Time"
Eleanor Parker "Of Human Bondage"
Gene Tierney "The Razor's Edge"
And that still leaves out sterling work from Lauren Bacall "The Big Sleep", Ingrid Bergman
"Notorious", Loretta Young "The Stranger", Rita Hayworth "Gilda" and of course Myrna Loy.
To my mind, all ten of these performances were superior to the ones actually nominated.
There was a moment in 1946 when they told the joke: "Last night I saw a film and Ingrid Bergman was not in it!"
Mirna Loy, Ingrid Bergman (Notorious) and Donna Reed (Life is wonderful) were the contenders I would have loved to find among the nominees, along with (pure wishful-thinking, since the role was not for Ampas) outstanding siren Rita Hayworth in her signature role (Gilda). Manhattan Melodrama, The Thin Man, The Best Years...pity Academy never took the chance to nominate such a charming, brilliant and sophisticated star.
For me, the standout performance in The Best Years of Our Lives was Dana Andrews. His scenes of PTSD showcased an unusual vulnerability from him. It made me take another look at him as an actor.
With a large ensemble like this film, it's hard to say if any of them are leads based on screen time and focus. Myrna Loy is a favourite of mine and a worthy nominee in Supporting, but I can't call her a Lead. But that would never have happened in '46.
I wish Loy would have been recognized for The Thin Man or some of her other collaborations with William Powell. They were magic together.
Wonderful selection for an Almost There! Funny thing is that in the very same picture there is another candidate for the column....and another excellent performer who never scored a nomination, Dana Andrews. Both are so fantastic in the film and I would have much rather seen Dana nominated and winning than a second go round for Fredric March. I think March is very good in the film, there are no bad performances, but he's been better elsewhere and isn't the most memorable male cast member.
Back to Myrna, she would be my winner for the year but in Supporting. That's what cost her. She might have headlined and been the biggest star but anyone watching the picture could never think of her as a lead. It's the men's story and the women while important to each guy's narrative are there in support of his trajectory and reactions.
The Academy had so many chances to honor her but let her down every time, the same is true for Edward G. Robinson, Ida Lupino, Jack Carson and so many others, but never more than here.
I would have left Jennifer Jones off the nominee list for Myrna Loy.
Ingrid Bergman, Notorious
Ava Gardner, The Killers
Rita Hayworth, Gilda
Dorothy McGuire, The Spiral Staircase
Gene Tierney, The Razor's Edge
(Clearly I have a type...)
Am in total agreement with those praising Dana Andrews, a marvelous actor whose excellence just seemed to have been taken for granted in the forties. Not a single nomination, though his body of work is impressive to say the least.
I'd have nominated him five years running:
1943 The Ox-Bow Incident (supporting)
1944 Laura
1945 A Walk in the Sun
1946 The Best Years of Our Lives (win)
1947 Daisy Kenyon (win)
with an additional nod for his work in the 1950 noir "Where the Sidewalk Ends",
a sterling reunion with "Laura" colleagues Otto Preminger and Gene Tierney
The Best Actress race of 1946 was nothing less than political.
Myrna Loy was top billed for a supporting role. The published Academy Award Rules for 1946 read, “Performances by an actor or actress in any leading role shall be eligible for nomination only for the Best Acting Award.” Top billed Loy was prevented from completing in the supporting category.
Many considered Ingrid Bergman a deserving nominee for Notorious. The previous Oscar winner was married but involved in an open love affair with wartime photographer Robert Capa. It has been suggested that Bergman’s flagrant behavior cost her a nomination. It certainly earned her Notorious director Alfred Hitchcock’s ire. He mocked Bergman who could not get Capa to agree to marry her in another movie a few years later. In Rear Window, beautiful model Lisa Fremont unsuccessfully struggles to move wartime photographer L.B. Jeffries to the altar.
In reality the 1946 winner of Best Actress was never in question. Olivia De Havilland was one of the most popular victories in Oscar history. In 1943 De Havilland completed a seven year contract for Warner Brothers. The studio informed the actress that a punitive six month extension had been added to the contract for her refusal to play certain roles. De Havilland sued under a provision of the California Labor Code preventing any employment contract extending beyond a maximum of seven years. De Havilland won her lawsuit and the subsequent studio appeal.
The legal wrangling took over a year in which De Havilland could not work. Her victory provided relief for every actor in Hollywood caught in contract battles. In retribution the enraged studio heads colluded and blacklisted De Havilland for another two years. When De Havilland returned to the soundstage three years later, it was a foregone conclusion that working actors would award her Best Actress Oscar in honor of her legal victory that improved the professional life of every studio contracted player.
Dana Andrews is Best In Show and I think should have won it all and wish Donna Reed was nominated for Wonderful Life. To me this movie is Dana and Harolds. show, March's story never really clicks as much as the others do.
One of my favorite movies of all time and the cast is brilliant top to bottom. It was rare back then for leads to be nominated in supporting. In a tough best actress field, Myrna Loy would have been on my ballot but the beauty of the performance is in the small moments as Claudio perfectly described. Outside of Jane Wyman, the other nominees were in films that focused on their characters. Regardless, this is one of the best movies ever with a cast to die for.
I miss the days before Cláudio got angry with the trolls and would read and reply to comments with additional insights.
Me too James. Sadly after reading the comments in this section there were no trolls to go after, but I'm sure when one appears Claudio would handle them in his level headed non aggressive way. Good comments yourself by the way. I usually save ones like your last for when there is an instance of trolling occurring for better effect and relevance, but I dig your vigilance! I do miss his back and forths with the genuine commenters too, but we know his talents and can assume he is in high demand elsewhere currently and in the future so I'll just appreciate anything he can give us.
James and Dean -- I apologize for not responding so often anymore. I am trying to read the comments less and write in even less, mostly due to some unfortunate interactions that really took the fun out of writing these pieces. I thought it better to engage less and be more motivated to write than the reverse. Still, I apologize for my inconsistent silence in the comment section of my write-ups. As always, I appreciate your feedback and the fact you keep reading my work.
James, I'm especially grateful for all your comments providing more historical detail than I could include in the piece. There always lots of tidbits that I end cutting out of these write-ups before sending them in. They are already huge and don't need any more of my long-winded verbiage. It's wonderful to know I can always count on people like you to add more historical interest and perspective to these pieces in the comments section. Thank you.
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