The Best Years of Our Lives - Family Review

Content Warnings

• Sexual Content

  Mild
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  Several scenes with passionate kissing between husband and wife and also between a married man and a single woman, who fall in love.

  A man starts taking his clothes off to take a shower; the scene fades before we see anything.

  A man briefly holds a photo of his wife in a bikini.

• Violence

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  There is one scene where two men get into a fistfight in a drugstore and one of them is pushed into a glass counter. He falls through the counter which shatters, but there is no blood or obvious injury shown.

• Profanity

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  A mild language.

• Intense Scenes

  Mild
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  A man lost his hands in a shipboard explosion.

  The character of Fred, who was an Air Force Bombardier, has a recurring nightmare about being in a plane that caught fire and watching helplessly while a friend died. The dream is not explicit, but Fred's fear and screams to his friend in the dream to "get out! get out!" are real. He wakes up in a cold sweat, sobbing.

  At the end of the movie, Fred is walking through a "graveyard" of bomber planes like the kind he used to fly, which are being sold for scrap. He climbs into the cockpit of one of the planes, and although there are no visual flashbacks and no battle sound effects, the music on the soundtrack and Fred's expressions and perspiration make it clear he is reliving some of his war memories. This is a very powerful scene which some viewers might find upsetting.