New Picture

Mrs. Miniver (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is that almost impossible feat, a great war picture that photographs the inner meaning, instead of the outward realism of World War II. Director William Wyler succeeds by the simple device of setting up an ideal middle-class English family in an ideal middle-class home, letting the Nazis knock both down. Result: what the Nazi bombers finally smash is not a house and household but (temporarily) man's hope of happiness.

The family is the Minivers (Greer Garson & Walter Pidgeon). The house is their spacious, chintzy, suburban home outside London. They are a happy couple in the lowering summer of 1939.

Son Vin (Richard Ney) is down from Oxford with an acute case of maturity and social consciousness. There are the youngsters (Christopher Severn and Clare Sandars). Mrs. Miniver (a suburban Candida) indulges the deliciously guilty feeling of having overspent her allowance on a gaudy hat. Mr. Miniver can overstep his architect's income for a sporty new car. Tomorrow will always balance the books.

By sensitive understatement and more good humor than most Hollywood comedies achieve, Director Wyler sustains this warm chronicle of everyday tranquillity through the early days of the war and the bombing of London. With reticence, good taste, and an understanding of events, he reflects the war's global havoc without ever taking his cameras off the Minivers' quiet corner of England.

The meaning of Dunkirk hits home when Mr. Miniver pilots his speedboat slowly down the Thames estuary with the flotilla of amateur navigators who set out to rescue their beaten Expeditionary Force. The Nazi mentality becomes viciously and pathetically real when Mrs. Miniver disarms a wounded German flyer in her kitchen, then slaps his face for talking Aryan nonsense. World War II is reduced to the compass of an Anderson shelter when the Minivers and their well-scrubbed youngsters ride out an air raid in their own backyard. It is anybody's backyard, anywhere.

The grand stage for this humanized history is just the Minivers' staircase, with its grandfather clock that is always a bit slow. It means Home, and the camera, by focusing on it, never lets you forget it. First to descend is Young Toby Miniver, who clumps down with his cat under his arm, shouts to his father with understandable urgency: "I can't stop, Daddy; Napoleon wants to throw up." Last to ascend is Vin, the R.A.F. pursuit pilot. The enemy and death pass him by in battle but kill his young bride (Teresa Wright) at home. He realizes the meaning of the words "a people's war."

The film is less an adaptation of the bathetic whimsey which Essayist Jan Struther made into a best-seller than it is a fresh screen play conceived by Producer Sidney Franklin and four writers around the original. It is played for keeps by an exceptionally good cast. There is scarcely an off-key performance in the picture. Outstanding is womanly Greer Garson's Mrs. Miniver. She had to be, and is, exactly right.

The Director. There is nothing loud about softspoken, chunky, wire-haired Director William Wyler, but he had to serve a noisy apprenticeship to prove it. He has been a Hollywood office boy, publicity man, script clerk, director of hundreds of leather-lunged Westerns.

That Wyler survived this occupational ordeal to become one of Hollywood's few top directors is due to his perseverance and talent. That he became the exception to Hollywood's rule of nepotism is a minor phenomenon. His mother's cousin, famed Nepotist Carl Laemmle, who liked to staff his movie enterprises with relatives, domestic and foreign, plucked Wyler from his Alsace-Lorraine home shortly after World War I, set him down at Universal. He left the studio in 1935.

Wyler is neither cocky nor objectionably conceited, but he vigorously maintains that "the best picture or star in the world is not worth a tinker's damn without good direction." His pictures speak for him: These Three, Dodsworth, Dead End, Jezebel, Wuthering Heights, The Letter, The Little Foxes, etc. They have not spoken loudly enough, however, to win him an Academy Oscar for direction, despite the fact that few directors can match his picture-by-picture output.

Good directors make quiet pictures, and Miniver's freedom from unnatural clamor is pleasant proof of it. Some of the picture's atmosphere is directly due to Wyler's World War I experiences. He was twelve when the war began, and his parents' home in Mulhouse was French. Alsace-Lorraine was a major battleground. Mulhouse changed hands a dozen times before the Armistice, and Wyler spent considerable time underground. His most vivid memory: crawling out of the cellar after each conflict, wondering whether he was French or German.

Wyler is renowned for shooting more film than any other director in the business. His reputation for wearing out actors with "unnecessary" retakes almost cost him the Grade A performance of Walter Pidgeon in Mrs. Miniver. It also earned him a rare tribute.

Tired from overwork and wary of hard-driving Director Wyler, Pidgeon agreed to play Mr. Miniver, with reservations. Before starting he sat on the set for a few days, watched Wyler shoot one apparently perfect take after another. "But on the 18th take," says Pidgeon, "I suddenly knew about Wyler. It was perfect, but it hit you in the pit of the stomach like a sudden, perfect chord of music. It made all those perfect-looking previous takes look like hell." When the picture was finished, he said: "I left the screening of Miniver trying to remember which of my scenes were in, which had been cut. For the first time in my life I couldn't remember one thing I did. I only remember the entity. That's directing!"

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