“I’ve got just the
thing for you!” I said, “A real classic and it gives a wonderful picture of
Britain. You’ll love it!”. As it happened, it was showing on TV.
The film was Mrs Miniver, the multi-Oscar-winning 1942 gem starring Greer Garson as the plucky British housewife at the start of the Second
World War, comforting her children in
the air raid shelter, welcoming her husband
back from taking his boat to Dunkirk, single-handedly disarming a downed German
airman, while life in her idyllic village goes on, interspersed with stoically-borne tragedy. In the iconic final scene, the congregation
gathers in the bombed village church,
the vicar delivering a Churchillian oration and through a hole in the shattered
roof, a shot of the RAF flying overhead in V formation to the strains of Land of Hope and Glory. Stirring stuff.
In 2009, it made
the American National Film Registry, for films worthy of preserving for posterity.
It “pictorializes” (sic), they said, “ the classic British stiff upper
lip.”
It’s well known that
Mrs Miniver was intended as
propaganda, albeit charming propaganda, to get
Americans to support the war effort. After the credits appeared the
words, “America needs your money. Buy
defense bonds and stamps.”
Never mind. It was
a massive hit in America – and in Britain too. When I first saw it I loved it
and cried my eyes out at the end.
So hubby and I
watched. And after a bit we looked at each other, “Hang on a minute!”
Living in two
countries does that to you. I was
suddenly seeing dear, familiar Mrs
Miniver with new eyes.
What I hadn’t grasped before was that the
perfect British wife had an American husband (or a Canadian, turned American
husband) in the shape of Walter Pidgeon and an American son and a
daughter-in-law, played by Teresa Wright, supposedly from an ancient English
aristocratic family, who, in her
touching death scene, asked for a glass of, not water, but “wahdurr”.
This wasn’t a British
family; it was an American family.
There it all
was, the white picket fence, the giant
fridge, the bedside telephone, the grotesquely
large sports car, the choir singing Onward Christian Soldiers with an unmistakable Yankee twang. I’m no
expert but I’ll bet you the birds twittering in the English garden were
American too. All patched together with
a few Cockney accents of varying degrees of phoniness.
Not to mention that this
wartime “average middle-class British
family” had several servants, wardrobes full of fancy hats and fox-fur stoles and an apparentlylimitless supply of eggs.
And they banged on in
a very un-British way about the “feudal” system dying out. (Posh girl marrying middle-class
boy and lowly station master allowed by Lady of the Manor to win at flower
show.)
Hollywood wasn’t
showing Americans the real Britain. How could it? Like many other films of its
time about “Britain”, it was filmed in
a studio in California. But it showed something Americans could identify with and so
reach deep into their pockets for – and perhaps it also gave British people an
image of themselves that they secretly wanted to see.
“So what?” you might
say. It was enjoyable, helped win the War
and was made decades ago. Things are different now.
Only I don’t think they are. Mrs
Miniver , however benign, is a lesson in the manipulative power – and inherent untrustworthiness - of the silver
screen. We can all name films that
blatantly distort historical facts – and America certainly doesn’t have a monopoly of those. But I’m talking about seemingly
innocent examples – like 101 Dalmatians,
supposedly set in Britain, which features American raccoons scampering all over the place. Even
the British-made Downton Abbey, hugely
popular over here, appears to have sprouted an unlikely number of American
characters, though at least they’re not pretending to be British.
We should be worried. But no matter how much I tell myself to keep
a critical mind, I have to confess that Mrs M second time
around still made me cry.
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