It's the hope that sustains the spirit of every GI: the dream of the day when he will finally return home. For three WWII veterans, the day has arrived. But for each man, the dream is about to become a nightmare.
Dramatizes, with great authority and subtlety that belies its date of creation, the return to a city in the American midwest of three soldiers who served together in the recent war. I can't improve on Roger Ebert who observed that "[William] Wyler uses deep-focus instead of cutting, so that the meaning of a scene can reveal itself to us, instead of being pounded down with close-ups." as well as Richard Brody who wrote in 2010: "it's resolutely on the side of the decorum and falls far short of the inner and outer postwar apocalypses envisioned in film noir. But the intensity of its liberal romanticism is utterly gripping."
