Mrs. Miniver 1942 123movies

Watch: Mrs. Miniver 1942 123movies, Full Movie Online – The Minivers, an English “middle-class” family experience life in the first months of World War II. While dodging bombs, the Minivers’ son courts Lady Beldon’s granddaughter. A rose is named after Mrs. Miniver and entered in the competition against Lady Beldon’s rose..
Plot: English middle-class family, The Minivers, experience life in the first months of World War II.
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Ratings:

	7.6/10 Votes: 18,005
	94% | RottenTomatoes
	N/A | MetaCritic
	N/A Votes: 203 Popularity: 11.33 | TMDB

Reviews:

It is not easy to describe this film. For the current generation, the film might not mean much but imagine those who watched this film, witnessing the events they themselves have gone through. Only then you truly understand the power of the film.

To me, who is in his mid-30s, the film is certainly a reflection of decent, honest, not over the top acting you may be accustomed to see in films of the same era. This is certainly the reason it gets the score I gave.

It could certainly be shorter but then you’d have to give up on some important character development scenes.

Would I watch this film again? I don’t think so. Would I make my friends watch it? Possibly not.

At times, I found this to be just a little too sentimental; but a nonetheless remarkable and beautifully filmed tale of the end of an era that saw Britain declining as an Imperial power. A decline never better portrayed than by Dame May Whitty as the redoubtable “Lady Beldon” now faced not just with the harsh reality of the physical war, but of the social changes that are sweeping her into political oblivion. Walter Pidgeon and Greer Garson again demonstrating the stoic spirit of WW2 Britain with dignity and fortitude. Henry Travers plays “Mr Ballard” with some tenderness too. The story is told through rose-tinted spectacles, but still well worth watching even now – 75 years after it was made.

A film which justifies its status as a major classic.
It must be over 50 years since I first saw this classic film, and for some reason I never watched it again until recently. To do so was an interesting experience – reliving many memories of the war years which I mostly spent in London. I think the reason why there was such a long interval before I decided to watch it again was a subconscious recognition that it was produced at a time of crisis, largely for political reasons, and a feeling this was unduly evident in the screenplay. Mrs. Miniver was released a few months after Pearl Harbour, at a time when many U.S. citizens wondered why their country should be expending its efforts fighting in Europe when it was Japan which had attacked them The film was quite clearly written, produced and directed with the objective of answering this question. Winston Churchill has made it clear that he regarded the release of this film as one of the biggest single contributions made to the allied war effort (worth, in his words, “a flotilla of destroyers”), and it is hard today not to regard the film as primarily a piece of patriotic propaganda. However the deft and capable direction of William Wyler and the almost uniformly great acting by the cast, particularly Greer Garson as Mrs. Miniver, go a very long way towards concealing the fact that one is viewing a film with a message and few would deny that the Oscars it won were thoroughly deserved. Mrs. Miniver certainly earns its place on any short list of film classics.

There are of course already many comments on this film in the database, I would have been reluctant to add any more but for the realization that people of my age who lived in England during the war are becoming increasingly few, and our comments – which must have a rather different perspective to those of younger generations – will not continue to be available for very much longer. Many of the very fine sequences in this film have already been reviewed more than adequately by others and I will not comment further on them; but two sequences which I found particularly evocative were the call on amateur sailors to help evacuate the British army from Dieppe, and the pub scene where the locals were listening to the British traitor Lord Haw Haw broadcasting from Germany and telling his listeners how futile any further resistance would be. In stating this, I am simply confirming that for such documentary type films people who lived through the events depicted will assess the film on the basis of their personal memories rather than on their cinematographic quality.

Ultimately, both on its first viewing and when viewing it again a few days ago, I found that for me watching Mrs. Miniver was irritating because it inevitably showed an American view of life as it was in England. Numerous very small points indicated that we were seeing a glimpse of middle class English life through American eyes. Whilst as an English born viewer I found this irritating, it did not in any way detract from the primary purpose of the film in showing Americans what life in wartime Britain was really like, and why their involvement in the war in Europe was so vital. Ultimately I had to accept that this was a great film which well deserves its classic status.

Its Propaganda Value is Greater than its Artistic Merit
Winston Churchill famously said of this film that it had done more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers. Set in what Halliwell’s Film Guide describes as “the rose-strewn English village, Hollywood variety”, it is a quite open and unashamed work of propaganda which deals with the fortunes of an upper-middle-class English family during the early days of the Second World War. Clem the husband takes part in the Dunkirk evacuation, his wife Kay helps to capture a German airman and their son Vin joins the RAF and fights in the Battle of Britain while conducting a romance with the attractive granddaughter of the Lady of the Manor.

Churchill’s view of “Mrs Miniver” was widely shared at the time, as it won six Oscars, including “Best Picture” and “Best Director” for William Wyler. Sixty years after the end of the war, however, it is hard to escape the conclusion that those awards were given for propaganda value than for artistic merit. I have not seen all the films that were in contention for the “Best Picture” award in 1943, but there are at least two in the list which I would rate much more highly, Orson Welles’s “The Magnificent Ambersons” and Michael Powell’s “Forty-Ninth Parallel”, another film which can be regarded as wartime propaganda but which deals with its subject-matter in a more thoughtful and less sentimental way than “Mrs Miniver”. Perhaps Powell’s implied criticism of American neutrality during the period 1939-41 did not go down well with the Academy.

Much of the criticism of “Mrs Miniver” has concentrated on what is perceived to be an inaccurate, Hollywoodized view of British life. There is some truth in these criticisms- the characterisation of Vin, for example, as a middle-class radical who utters his left-wing opinions in a pompous voice seems to owe much to the American view of socialism as the opium of the bourgeois intellectual. It seems, however, unfair to put the blame on Hollywood for all the stereotypes contained in the film. The idea that English rural life typically consists of lovable working-class rustics and formidable but decent aristocrats living in picture-postcard villages and obsessed by hobbies such as rose-growing may be a caricature, but it is the sort of caricature that could just as easily be found in British films of this period (or, for that matter, in some of a later date). Some of the accents seem strange to modern British audiences- Theresa Wright in particular seems stuck in mid-Atlantic- but I doubt if American audiences of the forties were bothered. Walter Pigeon makes no attempt to disguise his Canadian accent, but there is nothing in the script to say that Clem is actually an Englishman.

The film has much in common with another wartime movie from two years later, “Since You Went Away”, which did for the American home front what “Mrs Miniver” had done for the British. Both films combine patriotism and sentimentality in equal doses, and both feature a number of similar characters- a young man eager to serve his country, a pretty teenage girlfriend, an impossibly young-looking mother (Greer Garson here, Claudette Colbert in the later film) and even a crusty old grandparent who turns out to have a good heart beneath a forbidding exterior. It seems likely that “Since You Went Away” was influenced by the earlier film. Of the two I would rate “Mrs Miniver” slightly higher, but it does share some of the defects- excessive length and miscasting – that flawed the later film. Although it only lasts for two and a quarter hours as opposed to three, it is slow-moving at times, particularly during the first half. Greer Garson, who was thirty-eight at the time and looked ten years younger, was not convincing as the mother of the twenty-six year-old Richard Ney, who later became her husband. Her “Best Actress” award is particularly hard to understand. As with “Since You went Away”, most of the best acting comes in the minor roles, such as May Witty as the formidable dowager or Henry Wilcoxon as the patriotic Vicar.

My own views of the film are best encapsulated by that quote from “Halliwell’s” about “false sentiment, absurd rural types and melodramatic situations” that was so derided by another reviewer. The sentiment seems so false precisely because it is deliberately manufactured for propaganda purposes. Wilcoxon’s final speech is delivered in the sort of ringing tones that suggest he would have made an admirable substitute Prime Minister if Churchill had for any reason been unavailable, but these are very much the sentiments of 1940. By 1942 the world had moved on a bit. It was an unfortunate irony that a film which so excoriates the German bombing of Britain should have been released in the first week of June 1942, a few days after Bomber Command’s famous “Thousand Bomber Raid” on Cologne. There is a respectable historical case to be made that the bombing of German cities was a legitimate and necessary military tactic, but it seems hypocritical of Allied propagandists to have attacked the enemy for using the same tactic themselves. “Mrs Miniver” may have been effective propaganda, and propaganda in the service of a laudable cause, but that ought not to prevent us from recognising it for what it is. 6/10

Other Information:

Original Language en
Runtime 2 hr 14 min (134 min)
Budget 1344000
Revenue 13500000
Status Released
Rated Not Rated
Genre Drama, Romance, War
Director William Wyler
Writer Arthur Wimperis, George Froeschel, James Hilton
Actors Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright
Country United States
Awards Won 6 Oscars. 10 wins & 7 nominations total
Production Company N/A
Website N/A

Technical Information:

Sound Mix Mono (Western Electric Sound System)
Aspect Ratio 1.37 : 1
Camera N/A
Laboratory N/A
Film Length 3,665.52 m (14 reels)
Negative Format 35 mm
Cinematographic Process Spherical
Printed Film Format 35 mm