“Suckers”

From The Best Years of Our Lives (dir. William Wyler, 1946).]

Dana Andrews is Fred Derry, counterman. Harold Russell is Homer Parrish, fellow veteran. I’m unable to identify the man in the hat.

The language in this clip is of its time and ours. Racial slurs: “Japs” then; “China virus” now. “Plain old-fashioned Americanism” then; “America first” now (and then). But I never could have imagined that an American president would join the man in the hat in characterizing service members killed in war as “suckers.”