Mrs. Miniver


Mrs. Miniver is a 1942 American romantic war drama film directed by William Wyler, and starring Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon. Inspired by the 1940 novel Mrs. Miniver by Jan Struther, the film shows how the life of an unassuming British housewife in rural England is touched by World War II.
Produced and distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the film features a supporting cast that includes Teresa Wright, Dame May Whitty, Reginald Owen, Henry Travers, Richard Ney, and Henry Wilcoxon.
Upon its release, Mrs. Miniver was both a critical and a commercial success, becoming the highest-grossing film of 1942 and winning six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and Best Supporting Actress. It was the first film with a plot line centered on World War II to win an Oscar for Best Picture, and also the first film to receive five acting nominations at the Academy Awards. In 1950, a film sequel, The Miniver Story, was made with Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon reprising their roles.
In 2006, the film was ranked number 40 on the American Film Institute's list celebrating the most inspirational films of all time. In 2009, the film was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically" significant.

Plot

and her family live a comfortable life at a house called "Starlings" in Belham, a fictional village outside London. The house has a large garden, with a private landing stage on the River Thames at which is moored a motorboat belonging to her devoted husband, Clem, a successful architect. They have three children: the youngsters Toby and Judy, and an older son, Vin, a student at Oxford University. They have live-in staff: Gladys, the housemaid, and Ada, the cook.
As World War II looms, Vin returns from the university and meets Carol Beldon, granddaughter of Lady Beldon from nearby Beldon Hall. Despite initial disagreements—mainly contrasting Vin's idealistic attitude to class differences with Carol's practical altruism—they fall in love. Vin proposes to Carol in front of his family at home, after his younger brother prods him to give a less romantic, but more honest, proposal than he had envisioned. As the war comes closer to home, Vin feels he must "do his bit", and enlists in the Royal Air Force, qualifying as a fighter pilot. He is posted to a base near to his parents' home and can signal his safe return from operations to his parents by "blipping" his engine briefly as he flies over the house. Together with other boat owners, Clem volunteers to take his motorboat, the Starling, to assist in the Dunkirk evacuation.
Early one morning, Kay, unable to sleep as Clem is still away, wanders down to the landing stage. She is startled to discover a wounded German pilot hiding in her garden, and he takes her to the house at gunpoint. Demanding food and a coat, the pilot aggressively asserts that the Third Reich will mercilessly overcome its enemies. She feeds him, calmly disarms him when he collapses, and then calls the police. Soon after, Clem returns home, exhausted, from Dunkirk.
Lady Beldon visits Kay to try and convince her to talk Vin out of marrying Carol on account of her granddaughter's comparative youth at age eighteen. Kay reminds Her Ladyship that she, too, had been young—sixteen, in fact—when she married her late husband. Lady Beldon concedes defeat and realizes that it would be futile to try to stop the marriage. Vin and Carol marry; Carol has now also become a Mrs. Miniver, and they return from their honeymoon in Scotland. A key theme is that she knows Vin is likely to be killed in action, but the short love will fill her life. Later, Kay and her family take refuge in their Anderson shelter in the garden during an air raid, and attempt to keep their minds off the frightening bombing by reading Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, which Clem refers to as a "lovely story". They barely survive as a bomb destroys part of Starlings. The Minivers take the damage with nonchalance.
At the annual village flower show, Lady Beldon silently disregards the judges' decision that her rose is the winner. Instead, she announces that the rose entered by the local stationmaster, Mr. Ballard, named the "Mrs. Miniver", as the winner, with her own Beldon Rose taking second prize. As air raid sirens sound and the villagers take refuge in the cellars of Beldon Hall, Kay and Carol drive Vin to join his squadron. On their journey home, they witness fighter planes in a dogfight. For safety, Kay stops the car, and they see a German plane crash. Kay realizes Carol has been wounded by machine-gun fire from the plane, and takes her back to Starlings. She dies a few minutes after they reach home. Kay is devastated. When Vin returns from battle, he already knows the terrible news: Ironically, he is the survivor, and she the one who died.
The villagers assemble at the badly damaged church where their vicar affirms their determination in a powerful sermon:
A solitary Lady Beldon stands in her family's church pew. Vin moves to stand alongside her, united in shared grief, as the members of the congregation rise and stoically sing "Onward, Christian Soldiers", while through a gaping hole in the bombed church roof can be seen flight after flight of RAF fighters in the V-for-Victory formation heading out to face the enemy.

Cast

Screenplay

The film went into pre-production in the autumn of 1940, when the United States was still a neutral country. The script was written over many months, and during that time, the United States moved closer to war. As a result, scenes were re-written to reflect the increasingly pro-British and anti-German outlook of Americans. The scene in which Mrs. Miniver confronts a downed German flyer in her garden, for example, was made more and more confrontational with each new version of the script. It was initially filmed before the December 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the war. Following the attack, the scene was filmed again to reflect the tough, new spirit of a nation at war. The key difference was that in the new version of the scene, filmed in February 1942, Mrs. Miniver was allowed to slap the flyer across the face. The film was released 4 months later.
Wilcoxon and director William Wyler "wrote and re-wrote" the key sermon the night before the sequence was to be shot. The speech "made such an impact that it was used in essence by President Roosevelt as a morale builder and part of it was the basis for leaflets printed in various languages and dropped over enemy and occupied territory". Roosevelt ordered it rushed to the theaters for propaganda purposes. The sermon dialogue was reprinted in both Time and Look magazines.

Reception

Critical response

In terms of modern film technology directing, acting and esthetics, this was a quintessential Hollywood film. Yet it had a profound impact on British audiences. Historian Tony Judt says the film is a very English tale of domestic fortitude and endurance, of middle-class reticence and perseverance, set symptomatically around the disaster at Dunkirk where all these qualities were taken to be most on display-- was a pure product of Hollywood. Yet for the English generation that first saw it the film would long remain the truest representation of national memory and self-image.
In 2006, the film was ranked number 40 on the American Film Institute's list of the most inspiring American films of all time. In 2009, Mrs. Miniver was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically" significant. The film was selected for the following reasons:

Reactions to propaganda elements

, minister of Nazi propaganda, wrote:
The propaganda angle was picked up upon by Variety in its 1942 review:

Box office

The film exceeded all expectations, grossing $5,358,000 in the US and Canada and $3,520,000 abroad. In the United Kingdom, it was named the top box office attraction of 1942. The initial theatrical release made MGM a profit of $4,831,000, their most profitable film of the year.
Of the 592 film critics polled by American magazine Film Daily, 555 named it the best film of 1942.

Awards and nominations

Sequel and adaptations

In 1944 American rose grower Jackson & Perkins introduced Rosa 'Mrs. Miniver', a medium-red hybrid tea rose, named after Mr. Ballard's winning rose in the film. Over time the rose was lost to cultivation. In 2015, one remaining plant was located in a German garden by Orlando Murrin, a gardener in Exeter, UK. In 2016 it was successfully propagated by St Bridget's Nurseries in Exeter and returned to commerce in 2017.