"The Best Years of Our Lives," as Wyler's masterpiece came to be called, is a surprisingly dissonant portrait of homecoming, in which the cheerful American surface is consistently punctured by disappointment and dread.
Firefighter Prior's cheerful hardheadedness surfaced again in 2001 atop a mountain in Ireland, the couple's ancestral home.
His movie, which was shot in Oklahoma, Thompson's birthplace, is positively cheerful looking — on the surface anyway — with sun-drenched exteriors and candy-colored '50s automobiles.
Amid the seemingly packed waiting rooms at UKA's medical facilities at present, and the patched-up nature of the star names, Mo Farah has given the greatest reason to be cheerful with, on the surface at least, barely a niggle in a supreme season so far.
Beneath the surface of cheerful characters and colorful graphics is a booming empire worth billions in annual revenue — built to sell you your next fix of progress for the low price of an in-game purchase.
And though the community appeared cheerful enough on the surface, Ryan got word that several wanted to leave.
Much of the coverage, while cheerful (even grovelling) on the surface, contains a nasty undercurrent of snobbery.
"Salesman in Swimming Hole," a Saturday Evening Post cover from 1945, shows the head of a cheerful, balding man bobbing above the surface of a country pond.
That the surface of a manically cheerful consumer culture masks rage and terror is suggested by a pair of giant, inflated pink plastic bunnies by Momoyo Torimitsu.
On the surface, Iroh is a cheerful, kind, optimistic, eccentric old man, but remains a powerful warrior and a devoted surrogate parent to Zuko.
