Madame Miniver

It must be over 50 years since I first saw this classic film, and for some reason I never watched it again until recently. To do so was an interesting experience - reliving many memories of the war years which I mostly spent in London. I think the reason why there was such a long interval before I decided to watch it again was a subconscious recognition that it was produced at a time of crisis, largely for political reasons, and a feeling this was unduly evident in the screenplay. Mrs. Miniver was released a few months after Pearl Harbour, at a time when many U.S. citizens wondered why their country should be expending its efforts fighting in Europe when it was Japan which had attacked them The film was quite clearly written, produced and directed with the objective of answering this question. Winston Churchill has made it clear that he regarded the release of this film as one of the biggest single contributions made to the allied war effort (worth, in his words, "a flotilla of destroyers"), and it is hard today not to regard the film as primarily a piece of patriotic propaganda. However the deft and capable direction of William Wyler and the almost uniformly great acting by the cast, particularly Greer Garson as Mrs. Miniver, go a very long way towards concealing the fact that one is viewing a film with a message and few would deny that the Oscars it won were thoroughly deserved. Mrs. Miniver certainly earns its place on any short list of film classics.

There are of course already many comments on this film in the database, I would have been reluctant to add any more but for the realization that people of my age who lived in England during the war are becoming increasingly few, and our comments - which must have a rather different perspective to those of younger generations - will not continue to be available for very much longer. Many of the very fine sequences in this film have already been reviewed more than adequately by others and I will not comment further on them; but two sequences which I found particularly evocative were the call on amateur sailors to help evacuate the British army from Dieppe, and the pub scene where the locals were listening to the British traitor Lord Haw Haw broadcasting from Germany and telling his listeners how futile any further resistance would be. In stating this, I am simply confirming that for such documentary type films people who lived through the events depicted will assess the film on the basis of their personal memories rather than on their cinematographic quality.

Ultimately, both on its first viewing and when viewing it again a few days ago, I found that for me watching Mrs. Miniver was irritating because it inevitably showed an American view of life as it was in England. Numerous very small points indicated that we were seeing a glimpse of middle class English life through American eyes. Whilst as an English born viewer I found this irritating, it did not in any way detract from the primary purpose of the film in showing Americans what life in wartime Britain was really like, and why their involvement in the war in Europe was so vital. Ultimately I had to accept that this was a great film which well deserves its classic status.

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.

This film is great movie because it pulls at the heartstrings and brings forth real emotion in the viewer. As somebody who has recently moved away from a war-zone, the sense of loss of the innocent at the hands of a heartless and remorseless enemy actually moved me to tears.

I can see why the movie won so many Oscars - the performances are far above the standards of many of today's "greats", and the longer shots (unlike today's "grunge" editing or excessive camera movements) give the cast a chance to act out scenes in depth instead of doing one line at a time as is the current vogue. In one scene between the young Belden and Miniver, all the dialogue is conveyed by subtle body language. We don't see that from most modern films - cheap dialogue substitutes for communication. Less really is more.

I have one niggle - every single visual detail is wrong - it was filmed in America, where everything looks different. The train was not a Southern Region train, the garden fence wasn't British, and the interiors were like nothing you'd seen in English villages. And some of the accents were uncomfortably like products from "Dick Van Dyke's School of Bad Cockney" - a dialect only spoken in the East End of London!!!

Other than that, this film was a great, and I await the DVD eagerly.

I avoided watching "Mrs. Miniver" for years because I assumed it was a treacly, sentimentalized film that ignored what I considered the real issues of war. Knowing Greer Garson, who I considered the anti-Crawford, starred in it gave me more of an excuse.

I finally watched it as "film homework" and loved it. It's about an upper-middle-class English family (although most of the American actors are terrible holding their accents) and their experience in the early years of World War II.

A swiftly-moving storyline takes us from the complacency of peace through air raids, Dunkirk and tragedy. No one is a super-hero, but decent people who understand they must put aside their personal concerns and do what must be done to fight for their country and freedom. No one preaches except the minister and he, only rarely.

Of course, it being England, there's time for a flower show, and being a movie, there's a romance (WWII was not kind to Theresa Wright's characters, however).

The film's remarkable pacing is one of its great highlights. Long transitions are covered in the merest of hints; a comment that a servant has departed, for example. Yet there's time for powerful, lengthy scenes such as that of the Minivers holed up in a crude bomb shelter with their two young children, away from their storybook home. Despite the increasingly hellish crash of bombs and bullets, they try to chat about knitting and such. But soon the fear builds to an unbearable climax and the family desperately clings to one another.

The acting is generally superb, and much of the story is told through silent shots of the stars, rather than dialog. Few moments are as touching as the shot of the glowing young wife seeing her husband off to war, admiring his courage, contrasted by the barely hidden fear and maturity of the mother.

You can nit-pick; the movie has many of the conventional stylistic hallmarks of the period. But it is the masterpiece it has long been hailed.

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.