Mrs. Miniver (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is that almost impossible feat, a great war picture that photographs the inner meaning, instead of the outward realism of World War II. Director William Wyler succeeds by the simple device of setting up an ideal middle-class English family in an ideal middle-class home, letting the Nazis knock both down. Result: what the Nazi bombers finally smash is not a house and household but (temporarily) man's hope of happiness.
The family is the Minivers (Greer Garson & Walter Pidgeon). The house is their spacious, chintzy, suburban home outside London. They are a happy couple in the lowering summer of 1939.
Son Vin (Richard Ney) is down from Oxford with an acute case of maturity and social consciousness. There are the youngsters (Christopher Severn and Clare Sandars). Mrs. Miniver (a suburban Candida) indulges the deliciously guilty feeling of having overspent her allowance on a gaudy hat. Mr. Miniver can overstep his architect's income for a sporty new car. Tomorrow will always balance the books.
By sensitive understatement and more good humor than most Hollywood comedies achieve, Director Wyler sustains this warm chronicle of everyday tranquillity through the early days of the war and the bombing of London. With reticence, good taste, and an understanding of events, he reflects the war's global havoc without ever taking his cameras off the Minivers' quiet corner of England.
The meaning of Dunkirk hits home when Mr. Miniver pilots his speedboat slowly down the Thames estuary with the flotilla of amateur navigators who set out to rescue their beaten Expeditionary Force. The Nazi mentality becomes viciously and pathetically real when Mrs. Miniver disarms a wounded German flyer in her kitchen, then slaps his face for talking Aryan nonsense. World War II is reduced to the compass of an Anderson shelter when the Minivers and their well-scrubbed youngsters ride out an air raid in their own backyard. It is anybody's backyard, anywhere.
The grand stage for this humanized history is just the Minivers' staircase, with its grandfather clock that is always a bit slow. It means Home, and the camera, by focusing on it, never lets you forget it. First to descend is Young Toby Miniver, who clumps down with his cat under his arm, shouts to his father with understandable urgency: "I can't stop, Daddy; Napoleon wants to throw up." Last to ascend is Vin, the R.A.F. pursuit pilot. The enemy and death pass him by in battle but kill his young bride (Teresa Wright) at home. He realizes the meaning of the words "a people's war."
The film is less an adaptation of the bathetic whimsey which Essayist Jan Struther made into a best-seller than it is a fresh screen play conceived by Producer Sidney Franklin and four writers around the original. It is played for keeps by an exceptionally good cast. There is scarcely an off-key performance in the picture. Outstanding is womanly Greer Garson's Mrs. Miniver. She had to be, and is, exactly right.
The Director. There is nothing loud about softspoken, chunky, wire-haired Director William Wyler, but he had to serve a noisy apprenticeship to prove it. He has been a Hollywood office boy, publicity man, script clerk, director of hundreds of leather-lunged Westerns.