Matt's Big Oscar Challenge Day One Hundred and Sixteen: Keeping the British End Up

As we spirit towards the finish line of the 1940s its time for the last winner of that decade in William Wyler's Mrs. Miniver. The film, like Blossoms in the Dust, stars Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon as a happily married couple and parents to three children, two youngsters and a very upper-class lad called Vin who is off at university when the film begins. In fact Mrs. Miniver is mostly about how normal families and indeed normal towns are affected by the war. So for example Vin leaves university to join the RAF meanwhile he also gets married to Carol the granddaughter of the snooty Lady Beldon. Mrs. Miniver's husband Clem also agrees to volunteer the best way he can and helps in the Dunkirk evacuation. One of the most shocking parts of the film is where Mrs. Miniver finds a German soldier in her house and is held at gunpoint until she provides him with food she then calmly phones the police and he is arrested. There is also a subplot involving a rose grown by the train station controller and named after Mrs. Miniver which is entered in the flower show against Lady Beldon, who usually wins it. Beldon announces the winner and sees her name on the card but instead gives it to the station master and the Mrs. Mivier rose as again war has changed her. The film though does have a tragic conclusion featuring the death of one of the major characters and a solemn message of the dangers and casualties of war.

For me Mrs. Miniver is an odd beast and it doesn't feel like a winner in the way Gone with The Wind, Casablanca or even The Best Years of Our Lives did. One reason for that might be its awfully quaint and middle-class, the village that the Minivers inhabit is one in which everybody knows everybody else and its all lovely and cosy until those awful Nazis come along and ruin everything. I suppose one reason this may have won is because there was very little competition this year and also because it may've been the most accuarte depiction of wartime yet. As well as Best Picture and Best Director for Wyler both Garson and Teresa Wright as Carol both won Oscars, again this wasn't my favourite Garson performance that was in Random Harvest but Wright is very good as the young girl married too soon and then having to cotend with her new husband off fighting the war. Dame Mae Witty as Lady Beldon, Pidgeon as Clem and Henry Travers as Vin were also nominated and I like the fact that Travers actually later married his on screen mother Garson. There's nothing particularly wrong with Mrs. Miniver its a nice enough film but it just doesn't have anything about it to make a significant impact and make me believe that it should've won Best Picture.