Doherty creates a social, historical and cultural context to better understand the production environment in 1946, of which The Best Years of Our Lives could be considered a consequence.  Wyler, himself a veteran of the war, sought not to create a classical, heroic depiction of decorated servicemen’s celebrated and joyous return home, but rather, an honest film with rife with social and cultural implications.  Rather than giving audiences an idyllic and glorified portrayal of the return home, he recreated the difficult readjustment of veterans back into their “normal lives” at home.  That the film was met with wild success is a testament to Doherty’s argument that the postwar American audience found a deeper meaning in film, and sought it as a tool not to escape from, but to address social problems.

This book examines the portrayal of the war at different stages in books and movies of the time, and draws a correllation between the movie and the purpose it was considered to serve.  In the essay “New Heroes: Post-War Hollywood’s Image of World War II,” Philip Landon strives to characterize the common war film of postwar period.  He claims that “war films of that time shared a myth essentially similar to the western,” films that lacked critical acclaim due to their uniformity and generic context in portraying the war.  As Paul Fussell wrote, “Hollywood shared the mass media’s aversion to examining the actual horrors of the War’s mechanized battle fronts.”  The attempts of these war films were not to push any limits as far as conventions, depth and complexity of story, and level of provocation, but rather sought to create a “mythic hero remarkably well-suited to the mood and circumstances of post-war America,” as it was perceived by the studios.

This observation raises an interesting point touched upon in the biography of Samuel Goldwyn. During the war, Hollywood naturally made heroic war tales to instill sentiments of hope and pride in American citizens. However, Hollywood generally tended to apply this same belief to the immediate post-war period, Goldwyn included. Any actual dramatic portrayal of the war and its negative effects was considered a risky bet, especially casting a real-life double amputee with hooks for hands. But as the ARI analysis and the film's wild success both demonstrated, Americans were no longer disillusioned about the war, and in some way, shape or form, were seeking an outlet for this. The war had profound and negative effects on their husbands, fathers, brothers and sons who brought these effects home with them. The ability of The Best Years of Our Lives to translate the true-to-life experiences of returning veterans from all ages and socio-economic levels to film was groundbreaking at the time, and was what the American public wanted to see.