When Sean first proposed this series of episodes, and the film pairs that would be involved, Claude was kind of baffled with this particular one. Both of these films are amazing, and why would anyone be forced to choose between them? They have different subject matter, different directors, different storylines...about the only thing they have in common is that they were both released in 1946.
But apparently the either/or for these films is a thing, so here we are.
Both The Best Years of Our LIves (directed by WIlliam Wyler) and It's a Wonderful Life (directed by Frank Capra) are very long films with a lot of details and such attached to them, so we spent nearly an hour on each film. That's much longer than our longest episode so far, so rather than calling it a single "overstuffed" episode, we've broken it into two episodes being released nearly simultaneously (they're a few minutes apart, to be transparent about it). In this half, we spend the time on The Best Years of Our Lives, a film that runs close to three hours without an intermission, but if you've seen the film you know that the time practically files by, because you get so caught up in the story.
