Mrs. Miniver (1942)
Grade: 61
"Mrs. Miniver" won a mountain of Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress. There were also nominations for Best Actor and Best Supporting Actor.
With all those awards, you would think that it would be a great film. But time has not been kind to "Mrs. Miniver". Released in the summer after the U.S. entered WWII, the film's depiction of heroic Brits enduring the bombings of the hated Nazis was just what America wanted to see. Americans wanted to feel good about the sacrifices that were being made to support the war effort. To criticize "Mrs. Miniver" would be unpatriotic, even treasonous.
With the Nazis long since safely vanquished, it is possible to detach the quality of the film itself from the large spoonful of propaganda that it delivers. We are left with a well-crafted production filled with saintly characters and manipulative plot elements. "Mrs. Miniver" is an above-average soap opera that falls well short of the glory cast upon it.
The story focuses on the Miniver family. Walter Pidgeon is the father, Greer Garson his wife. They have three children, one of them (Richard Ney) is now adult and fresh from Oxford. Ney becomes a fighter pilot and romances Teresa Wright, who is the daughter of elderly snob Dame May Whitty.
When faced with inevitable German bombings, the cast is uniformly stoic and brave. They are also the nicest people you will ever meet. Mrs. Miniver does slap a boasting German soldier, but is otherwise perfect. Pidgeon is perfect and unflappable. Wright is as sugar sweet as ever. Ney returns from Oxford as a pompous intellectual, to the bemusement of his parents. Upon meeting Wright, he becomes perfect as well, albeit with more energy as befits a young man in love. Even the forever-outraged Whitty, who expects the world to cater to her, is eventually tamed and trained by Garson.
Garson was 34 years old at the time of filming, and looks younger. She is too young to be the mother of a grown man. Ney, playing her son, was 24. Garson and Ney would later marry in real life. Garson was nominated for Best Actress every year between 1940 and 1946, except for a lapse in 1941. "Mrs. Miniver" was her only winning nomination.
kollers@mpsi.net http://members.tripod.com/~Brian_Koller/movies.html
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