Disabled vets on the silver screen: beginning as far back as 1897 with Civil War wounded, disabled war veterans have been portrayed on film. Public perception of them has changed with the times

VFW Magazine, April, 2003 by Marty Norden

Films produced during the war, such as Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, The Enchanted Cottage and Since You Went Away combined patriotic and sentimental qualities (if occasionally at the expense of fully fleshed-out characters).

Postwar films--among them, Pride of the Marines, Till the End of Time, The Men and Bright Victory--dwelled at length on the complexities of the veterans new stateside lives.

The best known and loved of these films remains The Best Years of Our Lives, produced in 1946 by Samuel Goldwyn. It broke ground in a number of ways; not only was its director, William Wyler, a disabled WWII veteran, but he and Goldwyn took the unprecedented step of casting a severely disabled veteran-Harold Russell, who lost both hands in a demolition accident--in a pivotal role.

Best Years is among the most sensitive and forthright of the WWII-era portrayals, even if Hollywood was still succumbing to preconceptions about disability.

For example, this otherwise highly commendable film suggests a childlike dependency about Russell's character because of his inability to remove his prostheses and leather harness by himself. In real life, Russell had no such difficulty.

Missing in Action on Screen

Unlike previous wars, the Korean War did not inspire a tradition of movies depicting disabled veterans. One of the very few was The Eternal Sea, a 1955 Republic film. It focuses on the charismatic naval officer John Hoskins, who lost a leg at Leyte Gulf but returned to active duty in Korea.

A poignant scene shows him counseling severely wounded Korea vets, and the experience is so moving for him that he decides to devote the remainder of his remarkable career to helping disabled veterans and civilians alike.

A New Calling

Disabled Vietnam veterans began appearing in movies at least as early as 1969's Alice's Restaurant, but they did not assume prominent roles until the late 1970s and thereafter.

The films in this trend--Coming Home, Cutter's Way, Born on the Fourth of July, Scent of a Woman, Forrest Gump--often show the disabled vets as bitter, substance-abusing loners.

With the help of able-bodied civilians, however, they eventually rechannel their rage to achieve some other goal. Heavily implying that the vets must right some wrong back home to claim the heroic status denied them in Vietnam, these films contain the most powerful and complicated images yet of the disabled-veteran experience.

From marching in parades and bearing "badge of honor" wounds to facing postwar readjustment issues and finding new worlds to conquer, Hollywood's disabled veterans have steadily evolved over time and generally become more complex and in-depth.

They have gone a long way toward shaping the public's view of those who have sacrificed so much for their country.

MARTY NORDEN is a film historian who teaches in the Communication Department at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst. Many of the films in this essay are discussed further in his book, The Cinema of Isolation: A History of Physical Disability in the Movies (Rutgers U. Press, 1994).