Mrs Miniver

After a brief text extolling the  virtues of English suburban domesticity Mrs Miniver opens with Garson’s eponymous character  from Tunbridge Well or some such quaint Kentish townlet in London on a shopping spree nearly swooning over some expensive and truly awful hat topped with a stuffed bird, which she simply must have and heading back to her white-picketed home and her pipe-smoking, cardigan-wearing architect husband, Clem (Walter Pidgeon), who has just bought himself an expensive roadster. They chafe each other playfully over their extravagances before retiring to their single adjoining beds with Clem’s pyjama top buttoned up to the neck just so we don’t get the idea that they might get up to anything more robust. But then the war arrives to disrupt their domestic idyll. Their idealistic eldest son, Vin (Richard Ney), enlists in the R.A.F but not before marrying Carol Beldon (Teresa Wright), the sweet niece of haughty but good-hearted Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty).

This war-time propaganda film won the 1942 Oscar for Best Picture, Best Director for Wyler and Oscars for Garson in the title role (her fifth consecutive nomination) and Wright (Walter Pidgeon was nominated but pipped by James Cagney for Yankee Doodle Dandy whilst Henry Travers who played the rose-growing Mr Ballard was passed over for Best Supporting Actor (Richard Ney simply wasn't up to snuff as an actor to deserve a nomination although he and Garson married subsequently).

Looking at the film today, this is hard to believe even if there was not much in the competition, lumbering as it does under the weight of its heavy-handed sentimentalism. It is clear that its critical and commercial success derived from a tidal wave of patriotic fervor, America having just entered the war, rather than for any intrinsic merits.

Whilst as an anti-Nazi emigré from Hitler's Germany Wyler’s motives in ladling on the treacle are understandable, but take the emotive substrate away and the remainder doesn’t sustain. Garson was English-born, as was Dame May Whitty, but Pidgeon, Wright and Ney were Americans. But more importantly, despite fetishizing English mores and manners, the settings look nothing like England and the film was clearly shot on studio sets made by people who had never seen Home County England.

Had Powell and Pressburger or David Lean made this film at least it would have achieved a convincing atmosphere but as the settings are so wrong everything else seems bogus – Vin’s Oxford Left politics and spiffy R.A.F. uniform (don't we just love a man in one?), Mrs. Miniver’s noble capture of a German airman in her kitchen, Clem’s valiant trip to Dunkirk and back, the class-driven battle at the annual fair for the best rose and so on.  It’s ghastly saccharine stuff that only serves to make one wish for the real thing.

FYI: There was a 1950 sequel, The Miniver Story, with Garson and Pidgeon reprising their roles but with unsurprisingly, far less success.

Show detailed review

 

Want something different?