If you watch William Wyler's "Mrs. Miniver" in principally the first half hour, you might not see anything here other than a domestic drama where not much happens. Sure, you got Mrs. Miniver (Oscar winner Greer Garson), the matron of a British household with two kids and her architect husband (Walter Pidgeon). They are spendthrifts - she goes into town to buy fashionable hats and he is ready to buy a new car rather than fixing the tire of his old car. Their eldest son, Vin (Richard Ney), has just returned from studies at Oxford and pontificates about Britain becoming a feudal system. This is all very simply presented without much fuss or troubling issues. Oh, yes, and there is the girl (Oscar-winning performance by Teresa Wright) that Vin likes whom he dances with and proposes marriage.
Before you know it, air raid sirens are heard and the fictional town of Belham is struck by bombs from war planes overhead. This is the time of World War II where Vin enlists in the Royal Air Force and Mrs. Miniver is less than pleased though she never voices her concerns other than to her husband (who in turn is part of a riverboat mission to Dunkirk). The rest of "Mrs. Miniver" functions as sentimental war melodrama yet it works - I never felt that the film was thick in sentimental inclinations. We expect certain cliches for this kind of picture yet Wyler instead relies on irony and some unexpected lives are taken during these endless bombing campaigns. One sequence stands out with Mrs. Miniver - a wounded German soldier infiltrates her home and demands milk and food. It is a titillating sequence because we are unsure of the outcome - will he kill her or will she be able to disarm him?
"Mrs. Miniver" is often a stirring drama of the people caught in the middle of a war who are not soldiers - "it's the people's war." The movie has been pegged as propaganda by Wyler and even President Roosevelt who, at the time, declared the picture needed to be in theaters fast to rally the troops and provide morale. Regardless of how it was pegged and trotted about, "Mrs. Miniver" benefits from a most elegant performance by Greer Garson. She is the soul of the movie - the voice who does not speak about war yet her silence speaks volumes.
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