President Franklin D. Roosevelt was so impressed with Mrs. Miniver (1942), which won the Best Picture Oscar, that he requested from MGM a hasty release.
He also had the vicar’s inspirational speech at the end of the film printed in leaflet forms, which he then dropped by Allies airplanes over Nazi-occupied Europe.
As is well documented, the film went into pre-production in the autumn of 1940, when the U.S. was still a neutral country. However, over the several months the screenplay was written, the U.S. moved closer and closer to war.
As a result, scenes were rewritten to reflect Americans’ more contemporary and realistic view of the war. For example, the scene where Mrs. Miniver confronts a downed German pilot in her garden was made more confrontational in each revision.
Originally the film was to be shot at MGM’s studios in Denham, England but due to the war’s difficulties it was switched to Culver City, California.
After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that brought the U.S. into the war, the garden scene was re-filmed to reflect the new, tougher spirit of a nation at war. In the new version, shot in February 1942, Mrs. Miniver slapped the pilot across the face. The film was released four months later.[10]
Wilcoxon and director Wyler “wrote and re-wrote” the key sermon scene the night before it was shot. The speech made such an impact that it was used in essence by President Roosevelt as a morale builder and part of it was the basis for leaflets printed in various languages and dropped over enemy and occupied territory. Roosevelt ordered the film rushed to the theaters for propaganda purposes, and the sermon dialogue was reprinted in Time and Look magazines.
Obviously, Mrs. Miniver had a more profound impact on British audiences. Historian Tony Judt wrote that it was “a very English tale of domestic fortitude and endurance, of middle-class reticence and perseverance, set symptomatically around the disaster at Dunkirk where all these qualities were taken to be most on display. Though it was a pure Hollywood product, for the British generation that first saw it the film would remain the ideal representation of national memory and self-image.
In 2006, the film was ranked No. 40 on the American Film Institute’s list of the most inspiring American films.
In 2009, it was named to the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant.
The brilliant film critic Manny Farber was in minority at the time for panning the movie in “The New Republic”: “‘Mrs. Miniver‘ is about an English family which is prissy and fake like all screen families. The five Minivers are all very pretty and behave according to Will Hays and whoever wrote Little Lord Fauntleroy. Greer Garson makes motherhood seem the profession of impeccable taste and Walter Pidgeon acts the wise father by smoking a pipe, nodding his head knowingly and saying nothing…The older son is a mother’s delight from Oxford, and the two little Minivers make those irritating and unchildlike smart cracks because it’s the one device known these days for comedy relief in family pictures.
And he concluded: “The difference between these people and their originals in Jan Struther’s novel is the difference between marshmallows and human beings.”
My Oscar Book:
In hindsight, however, as I have noted in my book about the history f the Academy Awards (first published in 1986), Mrs. Miniver is one of the worst movies to have won the Best Picture Oscar, a fake, schmaltzy sentimental family melodrama.
