Mrs Miniver, a tale of British pluck in war-time, was stirring propaganda in 1942. Today things have changed somewhat...
This classic movie won six Academy Awards at the time, including 'Best Picture' and 'Best Actress' (Greer Garson as Mrs Miniver). The film, as a technical exercise by director William Wyler, does hold up extremely well. But oh, the acting!
Quite simply, Greer Garson must be amongst the handful of the very worst actresses ever to have walked off with the coveted Oscar. Forget that around the same time she starred in one of my all-time favourite flicks, Random Harvest. That film, like this one, survives her presence rather than benefits from it.
If you can imagine a goldfish with arched eyebrows and a permanently surprised expression, well, that's Greer Garson. As Dorothy Parker once said of another renowned actress, "she runs the gamut of emotions, from A to B".
In a nutshell, Mrs Miniver was an American propaganda movie made in the early years of World War II, to help convince the Americans that they were fighting on the right side. This was at a time, after all, when some prominent Americans such as aviator Charles Lindbergh and the US Ambassador to Britain, Joseph Kennedy (father of President Kennedy), thought the other side was the bees-knees.
The film begins with a little introductory note that this is a tale of an "average middle-class British family". This 'middle-class' family lives in a veritable country mansion, the husband (Walter Pidgeon), an affluent architect who doesn't seem to need to work, spends his time tootling around in a luxury touring car which he says he really can't afford, or in a lovely motor launch in which he later helps bring back some of Britain's best from the beaches of Dunkirk.
There's a young son named Vin, down from Oxford, who's signed up with the Royal Air Force to become a Spitfire pilot. There's the local branch of the upper-class, Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty), and her lovely grand-daughter Carol (Teresa Wright), who becomes smitten with Vin. And so that all classes are represented, we have the local station master and bell ringer Mr Ballard (Henry Travers), who shows that the working class is the absolute salt of the earth - as long as they remember their place, that is!
It's actually in many ways quite a fine movie, with some gripping moments of drama and emotion. It's just that with the remoteness of time, we can see just how indifferent an actress Greer Garson was, matched only by the truly hideous performance of Richard Ney as her gormless son Vin. This mother and son relationship does seem a bit suspect - and in real life Greer and Richard got married not long after the film was made.
But the air-raid scenes when Vin is up in the air fighting the beastly Germans and Mr and Mrs Miniver are sheltering and consoling their two truly hideously ugly smaller children, are quite compelling. The scene near the beginning of the movie when station master Ballard asks Mrs Miniver permission to name his prize rose after her is very touching. The sermon at the end of the movie in the bombed-out church when the surviving family has gathered together is strongly played, with a convincing performance from Henry Wilcoxon as the local vicar.
It was powerful propaganda at the time, and is still an historically important movie. But is it really the classic movie that most people still claim it to be? Remove it from its historical perspective and I'm afraid that what's left does suffer. It was a film for its time... and that time has passed.
