Mrs. Miniver

Saw Mrs. Miniver (Thanks, Anne!) It was a very touching piece of British WW2 propaganda. The film revolves around one family as WW2 starts. It opens with the titular Mrs Miniver sitting on a bus. She fidgets and looks more and more nervous until she suddenly jumps up and rushes off of the bus. What disaster is she trying to avert? What calamity? Why she's only rushing back to a hat shop, having decided that, yes, she will buy that expensive hat after all! this is very cutesy but of course, since this film tracks the start of WW2, we know she will suffer and this is artful misdirection and foreshadowing. This level of well thought out treacle remains consistent throughout the whole film. The central Mrs Miniver and her family are all so wholesome and sincere, they're like the Flanders family, but of course their suffering is therefore all the more hard to watch. the film has a Thornton Wilder-ish sentimentality about it which dips into treacle once or twice (god, those horrible little children) but other times aimed true and broke my heart.

Perhaps as a result of being made in the 40s but perhaps also due to the nature of propaganda, it's very traditional. The family attends church, even through the war, and everyone's a cockney accented working man or a snooty aristocrat (with, of course, a flinty heart of gold after all.) It's true that the son of the family comes back from college a wild-eyed Marxist but this folly is soon kidded out of him by his sweet little girlfriend. Nowadays the filmmakers would be sure to emphasize a harmonious multi-cultural group, a mixed bag to contrast with the fascist's uniformity but maybe this isn't the right approach to grab the populace. Maybe only tribalism can beat tribalism. I don't know.

Anyway, the film stretches on, jumping from vignette to vignette, sometimes skipping over months in a fade to black. This only adds to the poignancy of course. A freshly lost relative is now an old memory, a young boy is grown to a man and is sent off to war. The film is a stirring call to action which now reads as a chest-beating victory cry. It's a sweet film. It doesn't raise any interesting questions or offer new perspectives, but it tugs at the heart strings and is intoxicating.