A Film Canon

 

 

The strongest crossover between WWII propaganda and feature-length film, Mrs Miniver literalises the 'home front', reducing the eponymous heroine's (Greer Garson) low- ceilinged country house to a giant cellar, and the outside world to a nocturnal drone. In the process, her beloved village - a "quiet corner of England" - is reduced to so many conduits to the trenches, until it becomes a battlefield itself, in which every building is a ruin in the making, and a bullet can find its way into the back seat of a family car. This topographical levelling has its ideological counterpart in the gradual erosion of class distinctions - a semi-military gesture of camaraderie whose decoration is the "Mrs Miniver", a rose grown by the (working-class) stationmaster for the (middle-class) heroine, which comes first in the annual flower show, in spite of local aristocratic tradition. The result is a relocation of Wyler's taste for sickly, semi-incestual proximity from a domestic to national, and even international, register, as if to provide a latent critique of the extent to which the British had nurtured - or at least appeased - the forces now at their door. Hence Mrs. Miniver's discovery of an injured German pilot in her own backyard, as well as the extensive part that she plays in her son's (Richard Ney) engagement, consummating her odd identification with his fiancee (Teresa Wright). Even the conclusion qualifies jingoism with grim fatalism, placing as much emphasis on faith as action, and steadfastly awaiting a vision from the air.