Mrs. Miniver (1942)

This film gets off to a REALLY slow start, so slow in fact that it may lose some viewers if it airs on television. However, it is worth staying with for Garson's performance as well as the rest of the ensemble cast, once the dramatic stakes are raised. The film really does show the impact of war on civilians more than other films of the day, and the long set-up starts to make sense later in the film when we really start pulling for this family.

I do think that this is one of the more dated of the Best Picture Academy Award winners of the era. (This was right before Casablanca raised the bar significantly.) It is undoubtedly the best-known of the TEN Best Picture nominees from that year (aside from The Magnificent Ambersons), but one could argue it was a week year at the Oscars in general. The film for which I would have voted, Now Voyager, wasn't even nominated! Just goes to show you what the mentality was like in the early 1940s--propaganda over substance.

The one good thing about this film winning Best Picture is that it increases the likelihood of Greer Garson being seen by movie buffs, and she deserves that. Fans of director William Wyler can obviously find better movies in his filmography. Grade for this film: B-

Fmovies: Greer Garson gives a wonderful performance as Kay Miniver, a middle-aged English wife and mother whose kindness, intelligence, and positive spirit speak well of women all across England, during the difficult days of WWII. And that's what this movie is really about: the love and devotion of ordinary people during wartime.

Technically, this is a fine film. The script is well written and the plot is easy to follow. Most of the characters are sympathetic, and all of them have convincing arcs through the story. I did not care for the very Victorian Lady Beldon, but Dame May Witty gives a nice performance in that role. The film's plot has an interesting twist toward the end that coincides with the randomness of the effects of war. The story's tone does drip with a bit of sentimentality. But given the fact that the movie itself was made during the war it portrays, I think some sentimentality is entirely appropriate.

The film's B&W cinematography is conventional but competent. Production design and costumes are credible. And the special effects are surprisingly good for the early 1940s.

I will say that the film seems very dated. Customs and manners have changed so much in the last 65 years; the behavior of characters in this film is so proper and formal. That's not a criticism, just an observation.

The 1930s and 40s must have been a truly awful time for peace loving people. It's good, therefore, that we have high-quality films like Mrs. Miniver as a reminder of what life was like for ordinary people, to give us some historical perspective from which to view our own times. Of the many WWII films that I have seen, "Mrs. Miniver" is one of the best.

Winston Churchill famously said of this film that it had done more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers. Set in what Halliwell's Film Guide describes as "the rose-strewn English village, Hollywood variety", it is a quite open and unashamed work of propaganda which deals with the fortunes of an upper-middle-class English family during the early days of the Second World War. Clem the husband takes part in the Dunkirk evacuation, his wife Kay helps to capture a German airman and their son Vin joins the RAF and fights in the Battle of Britain while conducting a romance with the attractive granddaughter of the Lady of the Manor.

Churchill's view of "Mrs Miniver" was widely shared at the time, as it won six Oscars, including "Best Picture" and "Best Director" for William Wyler. Sixty years after the end of the war, however, it is hard to escape the conclusion that those awards were given for propaganda value than for artistic merit. I have not seen all the films that were in contention for the "Best Picture" award in 1943, but there are at least two in the list which I would rate much more highly, Orson Welles's "The Magnificent Ambersons" and Michael Powell's "Forty-Ninth Parallel", another film which can be regarded as wartime propaganda but which deals with its subject-matter in a more thoughtful and less sentimental way than "Mrs Miniver". Perhaps Powell's implied criticism of American neutrality during the period 1939-41 did not go down well with the Academy.

Much of the criticism of "Mrs Miniver" has concentrated on what is perceived to be an inaccurate, Hollywoodized view of British life. There is some truth in these criticisms- the characterisation of Vin, for example, as a middle-class radical who utters his left-wing opinions in a pompous voice seems to owe much to the American view of socialism as the opium of the bourgeois intellectual. It seems, however, unfair to put the blame on Hollywood for all the stereotypes contained in the film. The idea that English rural life typically consists of lovable working-class rustics and formidable but decent aristocrats living in picture-postcard villages and obsessed by hobbies such as rose-growing may be a caricature, but it is the sort of caricature that could just as easily be found in British films of this period (or, for that matter, in some of a later date). Some of the accents seem strange to modern British audiences- Theresa Wright in particular seems stuck in mid-Atlantic- but I doubt if American audiences of the forties were bothered. Walter Pigeon makes no attempt to disguise his Canadian accent, but there is nothing in the script to say that Clem is actually an Englishman.

The film has much in common with another wartime movie from two years later, "Since You Went Away", which did for the American home front what "Mrs Miniver" had done for the British. Both films combine patriotism and sentimentality in equal doses, and both feature a number of similar characters- a young man eager to serve his country, a pretty teenage girlfriend, an impossibly young-looking mother (Greer Garson here, Claudette Colbert in the later film) and even a crusty old grandparent who turns out to have a good heart beneath a forbidding exterior. It seems likely that "Since You Went Away" was influenced by the earlier film. Of the two I would rate "Mrs Miniver" slightly higher, but it does share some of the defects- ex

Mrs. Miniver fmovies. When a film touches one's own reality it becomes something rather special. For this reason I have long held a deep affection for Wyler's saga of an English family on the home front from the immediate pre-second world period to the darkest days of the blitz. It has become very fashionable to sneer at "Mrs Miniver" as sentimental propaganda long after the events it depicted. Was it really like that? Well - yes and no. The whole was very cleverly orchestrated by a team of four scriptwriters (including James Hilton), Hollywood's most accomplished director (William Wyler), MGM's able in-house composer (Herbert Stothart), one of their best cameramen (Joseph Ruttenburg) and a cast, when not verging on the caricature, giving the nearest semblance to the emotions I can remember living through as a child during those dark days. No one sneered at the time and the film gathered a well deserved collection of Oscars. It was only afterwards that doubts set in and reactions from a new generation became derisory. Looking at it today there are many things that are not quite right but they tend to be minor such as the risibly awful choir at the garden party, the maid snivelling to the point of embarrassment, the phoney look of American style fencing around those English gardens and the endless digs at class which, although part and parcel of how things were, were never quite so overstated. Where the work really comes into its own is in its portrayal of human emotions which was always Wyler's trump card. A film that attempts to enshrine that spirit of togetherness that comes to the fore in times of adversity and the fight against a common evil needed a director able to convey with an almost tactile sense of human passion. William Wyler, who during his great period from "Jezebel" in 1938 to "Carrie" in 1952 depicted the human heart with an intensity that has hardly ever been seen before or since, invested his depiction of the British wartime home front with a sincerity that almost completely deflects the arrows of criticism it has so often received. Ask again if it was really like that and I would cite the air-raid shelter scene some two-thirds of the way through as being in every sense definitive. My mother protected me in just such a way during air-raids in South London during the 1940 blitz as do the Miniver parents their children. I remember the crescendo of destructive sounds as depicted in the film as if only yesterday.

At the time it was a sensation and one of great influence, which obviously hit home with many American families, with the reality of the War still of course very much alive. The ending is not the expected happy one, but is instead rather thought provoking, stirring and influential. Reality, or part reality is after all always better than the typical MGM musical. Today it is not possible for it to retain the power it held during the period, but one of the reasons it is still a good movie because it is great wholesome family entertainment.

The Minivers are a family with great fortune who are well over the average income earning line to be considered just a middle class family. This is obvious with the picturesque house designed by Mr Miniver the architect. Some of the scenes have now become more noticeably studio bound now, which was something I did not notice before because it was one of the first old classic movies I did watched, but it hardly matters, as it still remains one of my favourite movies.

Greer Garson, in another of her charming English rose roles, gives a superb performance, as the devoted and loving wife. Walter Pidgeon is also great in his role, the second of his teamings with Garson. The great supporting cast includes Teresa Wright, Dame May Whitty, Richard Ney, Reginald Owen and Henry Travers. Henry Travers' as Mr Ballard, station master and a keen rose grower is in particular a memorable performer.

Elements of the film have been well combined with drama, romance, light humour, and finally, tragedy. It may have been given the Hollywood and typical glossy MGM treatment, but it hasn't forgotten either humanity or the sacrifices associated with war time problems.

Showered with accolades and awards at the time, the movie won Oscars for Greer Garson, Teresa Wright, screenplay, William Wyler and Best Picture of 1942. Walter Pidgeon lost to the dynamic performance of James Cagney in "Yankee Doodle Dandy". Henry Travers, and Dame May Whitty also netted nominations.

An agreeable screenplay and the direction of veteran William Wyler make this a forgotten treat. Few films have been as effective as this, and although its message may not ring as clear now as it did then, it has to be saluted for the war time morale it brought to movie goers around the world.

Rating: 10/10

With the help of the extensive British colony in Hollywood, William Wyler directed at MGM the best World War II propaganda film to come out of our film industry. Mrs. Miniver won a host of Oscars including Best Picture, Best Actress for Greer Garson, Best Supporting Actress for Teresa Wright, Best Director for William Wyler, all deserved.

Forget all the war pictures, this film about the trials of a British family just before and during World War II struck a poignant note with the American public. Showing how they were coping with the attacks on their civilian population made every American family identify with the Minivers. If they fail in their resolution to defend their blessed isle, we in America could be facing these same trials and depredations.

Like the people in The Diary of Anne Frank, the Minivers are such ordinary folks, caught up in a thing that was not of their making. The film opens with Greer Garson coming home after a shopping trip to London deciding how to tell her husband Walter Pidgeon about a new hat. On the way home, the stationmaster Henry Travers asks Garson permission to name a rose he's been cultivating for the flower show the Miniver Rose. Pidgeon's splurged on a new car and he's trying to figure out how to tell Garson.

The war comes and the Minivers and all their neighbors in their small country town have to deal with rationing and shortages and then the blitz as the ruling malignancy in Germany seeks to terrorize the British people into submission. As London took it as their Prime Minister said it would, so to do the small villages and hamlets, especially if they're located next to an RAF base.

Which is where their oldest boy, Richard Ney, is now stationed after having left Oxford. He's involved too, with a radiantly beautiful Teresa Wright as the granddaughter of the local grande dame, Dame May Witty.

Wright is involved in two of my favorite scenes. When she first meets the pretentious Ney and gently but firmly puts him down, who could help but fall for this girl. And her final scene with Greer Garson is what I'm convinced got them both Oscars. You have to see it, I can't say more and the hardest of hearts will be moved.

Pidgeon's moment comes when he's called away because he owns a small boat, a cabin cruiser we'd call it and ordered to take it to Ramsbottom. It's the beginning of the greatest citizen mobilization of the last century, the evacuation of the British Army from the beach at Dunkirk. He and thousands like him are told what the mission is and they could expect to be under fire at that beach and crossing 40 miles of English Channel. No one flinches and a very nice animated scene at night is showing all of these small crafts filling up the river on a date with history.

Garson also comes face to face with Nazism herself as she first is held captive and then turns the tables on a wounded Nazi flier who bailed out played by Helmut Dantine. Don't think all the women in America didn't think about coming face to face with evil right in their kitchens.

Both Walter Pidgeon for Best Actor and Henry Travers for Best Supporting Actor got nominations themselves, but lost to James Cagney and Van Heflin respectively. In addition Dame May Witty was also up for Best Supporting Actress, but lost to her fellow cast member Teresa Wright.

The valedictory for the film is delivered by Vicar Henry Wilcoxon after a bad raid in which several cast members are killed. With so much death and de