When the 15th Academy Awards kicked off at the Cocoanut Grove nightclub at the Ambassador Hotel on the evening of March 4, 1943, MGM's Mrs. Miniver was up for a staggering dozen nominations, and ended up walking away with six, including top of the marquee trophies for best picture, director, actress, supporting actress and screenplay. Greer Garson gave a record-setting six-minute acceptance speech; the next longest was given by Hilary Swank in 2000, winning best actress for playing what we'd now be obliged to call a trans man in Boys Don't Cry.
Mrs. Miniver was up against The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles' troubled sophomore film, whose reputation is far brighter today than it was at the time, while the rest of the best picture field was full of lesser pictures (49th Parallel, The Talk of the Town, Yankee Doodle Dandy) by top tier talent (Michael Powell, George Stevens, Michael Curtiz).
The war had not yet come to dominate the nominations (along with 49th Parallel, Wake Island was the only other war movie up for best picture), though it was all over the best documentary winners (a four-way tie with John Ford's The Battle of Midway, Prelude to War by Frank Capra, Moscow Strikes Back, a Soviet entry, and Kokoda Front Line!, a newsreel from Australia). The best cartoon Oscar went to Disney's Der Fuehrer's Face.
In the decades to come only three films (All About Eve, Titanic, La La Land) would receive more nominations than Mrs. Miniver until this year, when Emilia Perez was awarded thirteen, including a best actress nomination for Karla Sofía Gascón, a trans woman (born Carlos Gascón). While it looked like Gascón might have had a chance to deliver an epic acceptance speech, reaction to the film has been intensely divided, with Oscar voters on one side and countless online critics, the nation of Mexico and activists like GLAAD on the other.
Add to that a backlash after a series of unearthed tweets by Gascón criticizing Oscars diversity, George Floyd, Muslims, Christians, Catholics, the Chinese and even Catalans prompted Netflix to remove Gascón from their Oscars campaign. (I'm not going to say anything about Emilia Perez except to dare you to sit through this little selection of its musical numbers. I have never managed it.)
In their book Best Pick: A Journey Through Film History and the Academy Awards, John Dorney, Jessica Regan and Tom Salinsky vote two against one that Mrs. Miniver deserved its Oscar wins. Dorney states (inaccurately, as the picture was released over six months after Pearl Harbor) that "it was said at the time that this film pretty much brought American into World War II. And so, for historical significance alone, it probably deserves the Oscar.
Regan argues that it's a rare "women's picture" that has been "pejoratively and retroactively described as 'melodrama' They tend not to carry as much weight in the minds of cultural curators as films about soldiers and prisoners of war who are men." Salinsky argues that there were so many great films that were eligible but didn't get a best picture nomination, like Bambi, The Man Who Came to Dinner, Sullivan's Travels and Now, Voyager, and argues that Ernst Lubitsch's To Be Or Not To Be, one of his favorites, would have been more deserving. It's a persuasive argument.
Mrs. Miniver began as a series of articles written for The Times by Jan Struther, the pen name of Joyce Anstruther, the daughter of a Scottish Liberal Unionist politician. They told the story of a fictional character, a British housewife, as her life is slowly altered by the onset of war. A collection was published in 1939 though Struther wrote a subsequent series of letters describing her alter ego's wartime experiences; these were included in later editions and, along with the author's lecture tour of the still-neutral United States were more palpably influential in overcoming the country's isolationism.
(No less than Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Winston Churchill credited Struther with making Americans sympathetic to the British, alone and besieged on their island.)
The opening titles inform us that it's the story of an "average British middle-class family" whose life in "happy, easy-going England" will be changed by events outside their control. Director William Wyler's camera alights on the titular Mrs. Miniver (Garson) shopping in London, risking life and limb in traffic to make it to her favorite milliner for a hat – an extravagance she unconvincingly pretends to regret.
In a third-class compartment on the train back to Belham, a fictional town on a tributary of the Thames, she ends up traveling with two leaders of the community's social order – the Vicar (Henry Wilcoxon) and Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty), whose family, it's broadly and repeatedly inferred, once held the town in its feudal thrall.
Arriving home late she's waylaid by Ballard (Henry Travers), the stationmaster, who wants to show her a rose he has painstakingly bred and wants to name after her with the aim of entering it into the annual competition for the Beldon Cup – a prize that has been won for three straight decades by Lady Beldon herself.
Ballard is more than a bit infatuated with Kay Miniver and it's hard not to see why. Garson's Miniver is an exemplary mother and wife and a pillar of her community, and her loveliness is the outward sign of her virtue. This correlation of beauty and goodness is ancient, and this story about not just Belham but England is built on the notion that this woman, a paragon of her sex and class, embodies what's good about this country as it's about to be tested by a malign foreign force. Garson's face when facing danger or adversity – her eyebrows arched and nostrils flared – embodies the nation's defiance in its darkest days.
When she rushes home we're introduced to her husband, Clem Miniver (Walter Pidgeon), trying to hide on the passenger side of a lovely, big – though prudently slightly used – car he intends to buy. It's an indulgence considerably more expensive than her hat, but we don't doubt for a moment that the Minivers can afford both. In an era of cheap labour his salary as an architect lets them employ a full-time cook and maid and the services of a piano tutor who's clearly infatuated with Clem Miniver.
Clem is no modernist, no Bauhaus-influenced Erno Goldfinger; you assume that he has renovated and expanded Starlings, their riverside cottage, to respect its origins but still provide all mod cons. They're an ideal picture of the middle class perfected after centuries, comfortable in their deserved affluence but unwilling to disturb the gentry they're replacing more than is strictly necessary.
The film does nothing to explain why Clem Miniver lacks any British accent, and American audiences at least were untroubled by it. Garson and the Canadian-born Pidgeon had been profitably teamed together by MGM a year earlier for Blossoms in the Dust and would become a reliable box office combo comparable to Myrna Loy and William Powell for the next decade, ultimately starring in eight films together.
Kay and Clem have three children, two of whom are small children while the third and eldest, Vin (Richard Ney), is an Oxford undergraduate, reliably insufferable and given the usual self-righteous enthusiasms like vegetarianism and a newfound social conscience. Home from school he ends up clashing with Carol (Teresa Wright), Lady Beldon's granddaughter, who takes it upon herself to plead with Mrs. Miniver to get Ballard to withdraw his rose from the competition.
Vin is incensed by the request, calling it feudal and invoking the full fury of the common room socialist on his family's guest. She applauds him for his outrage at what he sees as injustice but asks him if he does anything about it while mentioning the summer she's just spent working in the "slums of London." It goes without saying that the two young people begin falling in love while the summer wanes and Europe slides into war.
William Wyler is both one of the greatest and most unsung of Hollywood's studio directors. German-born, he began his career in the silent era at Universal, but free from his contract there he went from studio to studio leaving masterpieces behind, starting with Dodsworth in 1936, followed by Dead End, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Letter and The Little Foxes, his last film before Mrs. Miniver, which would be his only picture made for MGM until Ben-Hur in 1959.
He left Hollywood for the U.S. Army Air Force where he made the documentary masterpiece The Memphis Belle: The Story of a Flying Fortress (1944), then returned to Hollywood to direct The Best Years of Our Lives, perhaps the definitive Hollywood story of America as it demobilized.
His postwar career was no less accomplished, and included The Heiress, Carrie, Roman Holiday, The Desperate Hours, The Children's Hour, The Collector, How to Steal a Million and Funny Girl. And yet Wyler is known less for his name than his filmography; as crucial as Ford, Hawks, Wellman, Huston or Stevens but rarely as celebrated. He's known as an actor's director mostly due to his work with Bette Davis – he made three of her best pictures – but what stands out in Mrs. Miniver is his impeccable pacing.
He takes just long enough to paint a portrait of Kay Miniver, her family and community before sending everyone steadily and relentlessly into the cataclysm of war. No sooner have Vin and Carol fallen in love than she returns from vacation in Scotland to appear in the Beldon family pew on the first Sunday of September, two days after the German invasion of Poland.
The vicar offers to cut the service short after being told that Britain and France have declared war, so everyone can prepare for what they assume is imminent – the first air raid siren of the war, a famous false alarm that nonetheless signals the end of peace and the timeless rituals of village life.
One quick cut later and we've fast-forwarded through months of the "Phoney War" or "Sitzkreig": blackout is in effect; Clem Miniver is part of an informal home guard patrolling the village, stopping into the pub where the locals impassively listen to Lord Haw Haw's radio program.
Vin has joined the RAF while the Miniver's servants have left for the WAAFs and war work, doubtless never to return to domestic service. He proposes to Carol but gets called away for sorties against the enemy, and later that night Clem and every other boat owner in Belham are told to fuel up and head downriver to await further orders.
The story of Dunkirk and the civilian flotilla of "little boats" that evacuated what was left of Britain's standing army before the fall of France was both a moment of defeat and triumph for England at the beginning of their lowest point during the war. Wyler sets it up with a series of epic shots of boats sailing down wider and wider river channels, increasing in number, silhouettes against the moonlit water. This sequence would be almost exactly copied in 1958's Dunkirk, starring John Mills and Richard Attenborough.
But Wyler cuts back to Kay Miniver and Starlings, five days later with no news from Clem. We'd heard in passing of an enemy plane shot down in the area but she discovers its pilot (Helmut Dantine) wounded and asleep in her garden. He wakes up before she can take his Luger away, forces her to give him food and drink but faints on her kitchen floor.
The scene with the enemy airman evolved as the film moved from script to production, and Garson and Dantine would be called back for re-shoots as America moved from isolationism to declaring war after Japan's surprise attack on Hawaii. He began as a wounded boy who elicits Garson's maternal sympathy to a cornered enemy, threatening to return in the thousands to sweep away the Minivers and their world, for which he earns a slap from Kay.
No sooner have the constabulary taken the pilot away than Clem returns, filthy and exhausted, his boat torn up and bullet holed. He patronizingly imagines that Kay's been placidly awaiting the hero's return before learning about the wounded flyer, and just then Lady Beldon arrives to announce her opposition to Vin and Carol's marriage with the same outrage at the impertinence of Ballard's rose.
At this point, as Churchill said, the battle of France of was over and the Battle of Britain has begun. The Minivers, minus Vin, are in their Anderson shelter behind their home; Kay reads the children to sleep with Lewis Carroll and the story of the Nativity. They go outside briefly to watch the night's air raid over the river and across the fields. From miles away it's quite a show.
Back under cover they make small talk while Mrs. Miniver knits a scarf for Vin. Even this has become routine, at least until new planes fly closer and the bombs begin falling around them, shaking the earth and waking the children. The next morning Vin and Carol, now newlyweds, arrive home from their honeymoon in Scotland and find the Miniver home half in ruins.
But we mustn't grumble as the village fete is that afternoon, and the awarding of the Beldon Cup. Clem is off on guard duty but Kay is there to put gentle pressure on Lady Beldon to disregard the decision of her obsequious judges and give the award to the more deserving Ballard and his Miniver rose.
American has always been fascinated by Britain's class system, assuming an attitude of grateful wonder that they had the wisdom to secede from this social order while ignoring their own complex and mutable gradations of class. Ballard's win and Lady Beldon's display of noblesse oblige is the film's great transformative moment, despite the station master's reflexive forelock-tugging apology, asking Lady Beldon to "pardon the liberty."
There's another transformative moment in this scene, when Kay tells Carol that there are now three Mrs. Minivers in Belham – herself, her new daughter-in-law and the prize-winning rose named in their honour. This barely registers before the air raid siren goes off, dispersing the town to find cover as Kay, Carol and Vin take Clem's car to the airfield where Vin's squadron is scrambling to meet a massive flight of German planes heading across the Channel – perhaps referring Adlertag or "Eagle Day" on August 13, 1940 when the Luftwaffe was sent to destroy the RAF over Essex, Kent, Sussex and Hampshire.
Driving home in the blackout Kay and Carol watch a German bomber crash in flames, then pull over while two fighters dogfight just above the treetops. The car is strafed and Carol is hit; while waiting for an ambulance at Starlings Kay leaves the girl for a moment to get water and she dies alone on the floor of their house. Wright delivers this tragic moment with little more than a choke and a sigh in the near total darkness. (The film also won an Oscar for best black and white cinematography.)
The film's final scene is Sunday mass in the ruins of the village church, where we learn that other victims of the air raid included Ballard and a choir boy. The Vicar delivers a sermon on total war, a "war of the people", that would be reprinted in Time and Look magazines; Vin leaves his family to join Lady Beldon, now sitting alone in her family pew; the congregation sings "Onward Christian Soldiers" while the camera pans up through the missing roof to the sky, as fighters in "V" formations fly past.
Nobody involved in the making of Mrs. Miniver, most especially Wyler, denied that they were making propaganda. Roosevelt ordered the film rushed into theatres and had the Vicar's sermon reprinted on leaflets in different languages and dropped over enemy territory. Churchill was supposed to have said that Mrs. Miniver was worth more than a flotilla of destroyers, and no less than Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda, claimed that "its refined powerful propagandistic tendency has up to now only been dreamed of."
Mrs. Miniver was a box office smash in both the US and Britain, and Hollywood would reach its stride with propaganda a year later, when Casablanca won the best picture Oscar.
Garson started a scandal when she began an affair with Ney, the actor playing her son, and the couple married in 1943. There was a twelve-year difference in their ages – though MGM tried to claim it was only three by shaving years off Garson's age – but the marriage wasn't a happy one and they divorced in 1947.
Ney is frankly the weakest link in the picture, and unlike Pidgeon he attempts an ill-advised British accent. Still, even if you didn't know about their affair the affection and notably fervent kisses shared by Ney and Garson throughout the picture add to the persistent erotic charge that follows Mrs. Miniver throughout the film. Put crudely, Garson's Kay Miniver is one of cinema's great MILFs.
(Ney would ultimately leave acting for a career as a financial consultant, writing a series of books in the '70s detailing how small investors were victims of market manipulation.)
MGM teamed Garson and Pidgeon up in 1950 for The Miniver Story, a sequel to Mrs. Miniver that begins on VE Day, when Kay and Clem have been apart for a year. He's in Hamburg with the army, their daughter Judy is an ATS driver stationed in Cairo and in love with a married general, while their youngest son Toby had been sent to live in America. Vin has been erased and with him Lady Beldon, probably because of Ney's breakup with Garson.
Clem is restless and haunted by what he saw in Europe and wants to go to work in Brazil, while Kay has had an intense but apparently platonic affair with an American officer. She also has a fatal heart condition that she keeps from her family and dies at the end of the picture. The whole thing sags under a melancholy heaviness that might reflect some strain of postwar zeitgeist that doesn't get talked about much today, and it definitely lacks Wyler's deft pacing, which probably explains why it flopped at the box office.
The Oscars are tomorrow, when we'll find out how Emilia Perez did with the Academy's voters, and if it wins enough statues to let someone with a sense of history declare that Emilia Perez is the Mrs. Miniver of 2025 – a possibility that should rob us all of at least a few nights' sleep.
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