“We’ll Meet Again Don’t Know Where, Don’t Know When”-Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon’s “Mrs. Miniver (1942)-A Film Review

DVD Review

By Film Critic Emeritus Sam Lowell

Mrs. Miniver, starring Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Dame May Whitty, Teresa Wright,  Richard Ney, 1942

They say that Dame Vera Lynn’s (at least I think she is a Dame now if she is still alive and a quick look at Wikipedia confirms that she is at 100 having been born during World War I and hence having seen many, many wars over the past century)  song We’ll Meet Again got England, you know the stiff upper lip British, through the night of the long knives when that country was basically alone fighting against the Nazi night-takers after Hitler and his minions stepped over most of Europe and the destruction of the British Isles by a massive bombing campaign was beating down as a last step in that act. This before Pearl Harbor put American boots on European soil. (The Americans having their own get through the war song Til We Meet Again to keep up morale as the soldiers, sailors, marines and flyboys were leaving these shores for an uncertain fate many laying their heads down on those foreign shores.) If that was the case then the film under review, the award-winning Mrs. Miniver, was the cinematic complement to that song as a combination straight story about civilian wartime struggles in the modern age when such populations have unfortunately become front and center in military warfare planning and none too veiled propaganda for the British government’s war effort. (Such things are hard to gauge but as eminent a spokesman for British war efforts as war-time leader Winton Churchill said the film (and the book it was based on) was invaluable to keep British morale high.) 

Some seventy-five years on and too many brutal wars to count, including atrocities which come close to those of World War II, it is hard to say whether such a film did or did not lift morale although especially with the minister’s sermon that ended the film urging all Britons to keep the faith and keep pushing on it must have had some impact. For now though let me give the reader the “skinny” as I like to do and you can figure how much of a propaganda vehicle it was against the storyline of how a ordinary middle class British family dealt with the hard realities of war on its doorstep.    

  

Obviously the key figure here is the ordinary citizen housewife Mrs. Miniver, played by Greer Garson who won an Oscar for her performance, as she tries to keep her family together through those trying times. This although her husband, Clem, played by Oscar-nominated Walter Pidgeon who was too old for military service but who took his civilian war service seriously (including participating in the evacuation at Dunkirk in the darkest days of the war as Germany was marching to the seas) was at home. And despite her worry over her oldest son joining the Royal Air Force as a fighter pilot at a time when Germany essentially ruled the skies over Britain. The most important thing that Mrs. Miniver does, aside from keeping the faith that her country will survive this big hit, is to keep cool, keep that notorious stiff upper lip as least for public consumption and therefore becomes a model for her fellow villagers. That becomes increasingly necessary as the air war begins to take a serious toll since there is an RAF base close by which the nasty Germans are very interested in putting out of commission. (One gardener set on winning an annual flower competition which went on as usual named his rose selection after her as tribute to her low key steadfastness).     

Along the way Mrs. Miniver faces a number of trials which only steel her against the plotting of the night-takers including coolly capturing a downed German pilot, constant worries over her son’s fate up in the skies and as the German juggernaut hones in on that airbase protecting her two younger children as the Germans lay waste to her homestead (seeing that destruction which I think would have made most women, and men, flip out she merely carries on with what is left of the house and Clem does to in his own understated way). Added in is a little romance aside from the warm regard that she and Clem have for each in their marital relationship. That RAF son, played by Richard Ney, meets the granddaughter, played by Oscar-winning Teresa Wright, of the local leader of the gentry in those parts, played by Dame May Whitty, and they fall in love, get married and plan for an uncertain future despite that Lady’s objections. In the end that romance is shattered but not in the way one would expect. Mrs. Miniver’s now daughter-in law is killed during a German air attack as they were exposed in the open rather than her son up in the skies. As the film ends that previously mentioned minister’s sermon speaks of the new ways of war, the need to fight a people’s war against the night-takers. (Although the British were none too keen, not at all, when their “colonials” got all uppity in places like India after the war working for their liberation through that same basic strategy.)  Like I said it is hard to see what effect this film had on morale at the time but it certainly was a very powerful if in spots melodramatic film showing the modern realities of warfare.