Thursday, July 20, 2017

Best Picture of 1942: Mrs. Miniver

Britain is on the verge of war. There is nothing that can stop it from coming. This story from MGM shows the strength that one family faces in the beginning of World War II. Particularly, the strength that one wife and mother has to try and help to get her family, and her village, through the beginnings of war. That wife and mother's name is Mrs. Miniver 

Mrs. Miniver is an English woman is who's only real concern in her life is to raise a good family, and not anger her husband too much by buying nice things. However, all of this begins to change when her oldest son come home from school and shortly after the War starts making it's way to the shores or their home. Mrs. Miniver's story shows what home life is like as the whole world starts to come under attack by the Germans. Not just the story of a wife with her husband gone off to war, or just a mother who's son is off fighting, but the story of a person in a community that does come under attack and what is left in the war's wake.

 This movie has a really interesting history. It was originally going to be released in late 1941. The reason it was released later was because as the movie got closer to release and finishing American started to become less and less neutral in the war. Several of the scenes were re-written and re-shot in order to rally America together to support our troops. When production was supposed to be done in December on 1941 the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor and production was able to change on key scene in the movie in order to reflect the anger that America felt from the attack. That scene would be when Mrs. Miniver was able to slap a downed German piolet in the face.

This year seemed to be a very patriotic year in movies. Other anti-war, pro-allies, or pro-American films nominated that year were: Otus' The Invaders (49th Parallel), 20th Century Fox's The Pied Piper, Goldwyn's The Pride of the Yankees, Paramount's Wake Island, and Warner brother's Yankee Doodle Dandy. Other films nominated that year were Columbia's The Talk of the Town, Warner Brothers' Kings Row, RKO's The Magnificent Ambersons, and MGM's Random Harvest. Other honors that this film has are American Film Institute ranked the film number 40 on their Most Inspirational Films of All Time List in 2006 and was selected by the National Film Registry for preservation in 2009.

I hands down loved this film. I loved this film for many different reasons: the acting, the cinematography, ect., but I really loved this film because it showed a different side of way that we don't even see much of in today's film making. That is the story of the home front when the boys are off to war. So many war films shows the boys in action half way around the world and we only see the people that they love in snippets. This film does it differently. This film shows what it was like for the women and children back home waiting for the war to be over. This film shows not only one mother's son going off to war, but it shows how her husband went off to save the soldiers in Dunkirk, it shows the pain that England went through when their homes were bombed, it showed the people that we loved in the film dying because of the wages of war on their home turf. This film touched many aspects of war that not many other films dare to do. Many film show the battle wath were fought, and the soldiers that we have lost, or the stories of a select few outrageously brave souls that have defended out countries. However, none really have shown what the families had to go through to survive the war as well. That even though the solders may escape the tragedies on the war front that they don't know what they will return to when they get home. They want it to be the same but they don't know how much war changed their country as well as themselves. I love this film because it's one of the rare few that helps to put the devastation of war into prospective as a whole and not just by the soldiers on the front.  

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