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- excessive length and miscasting - that flawed the later film. Although it only lasts for two and a quarter hours as opposed to three, it is slow-moving at times, particularly during the first half. Greer Garson, who was thirty-eight at the time and looked ten years younger, was not convincing as the mother of the twenty-six year-old Richard Ney, who later became her husband. Her "Best Actress" award is particularly hard to understand. As with "Since You went Away", most of the best acting comes in the minor roles, such as May Witty as the formidable dowager or Henry Wilcoxon as the patriotic Vicar.
My own views of the film are best encapsulated by that quote from "Halliwell's" about "false sentiment, absurd rural types and melodramatic situations" that was so derided by another reviewer. The sentiment seems so false precisely because it is deliberately manufactured for propaganda purposes. Wilcoxon's final speech is delivered in the sort of ringing tones that suggest he would have made an admirable substitute Prime Minister if Churchill had for any reason been unavailable, but these are very much the sentiments of 1940. By 1942 the world had moved on a bit. It was an unfortunate irony that a film which so excoriates the German bombing of Britain should have been released in the first week of June 1942, a few days after Bomber Command's famous "Thousand Bomber Raid" on Cologne. There is a respectable historical case to be made that the bombing of German cities was a legitimate and necessary military tactic, but it seems hypocritical of Allied propagandists to have attacked the enemy for using the same tactic themselves. "Mrs Miniver" may have been effective propaganda, and propaganda in the service of a laudable cause, but that ought not to prevent us from recognising it for what it is. 6/10
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- excessive length and miscasting - that flawed the later film. Although it only lasts for two and a quarter hours as opposed to three, it is slow-moving at times, particularly during the first half. Greer Garson, who was thirty-eight at the time and looked ten years younger, was not convincing as the mother of the twenty-six year-old Richard Ney, who later became her husband. Her "Best Actress" award is particularly hard to understand. As with "Since You went Away", most of the best acting comes in the minor roles, such as May Witty as the formidable dowager or Henry Wilcoxon as the patriotic Vicar.
My own views of the film are best encapsulated by that quote from "Halliwell's" about "false sentiment, absurd rural types and melodramatic situations" that was so derided by another reviewer. The sentiment seems so false precisely because it is deliberately manufactured for propaganda purposes. Wilcoxon's final speech is delivered in the sort of ringing tones that suggest he would have made an admirable substitute Prime Minister if Churchill had for any reason been unavailable, but these are very much the sentiments of 1940. By 1942 the world had moved on a bit. It was an unfortunate irony that a film which so excoriates the German bombing of Britain should have been released in the first week of June 1942, a few days after Bomber Command's famous "Thousand Bomber Raid" on Cologne. There is a respectable historical case to be made that the bombing of German cities was a legitimate and necessary military tactic, but it seems hypocritical of Allied propagandists to have attacked the enemy for using the same tactic themselves. "Mrs Miniver" may have been effective propaganda, and propaganda in the service of a laudable cause, but that ought not to prevent us from recognising it for what it is. 6/10