Perhaps apocryphally Winston Churchill is to have said that Mrs. Miniver did more for winning the Battle of Britain than would have a whole flotilla of destroyers. Taken from the popular novel by Jan Struther, William Wyler's film about a London family impacted by World War II is clearly in line with Churchill's sentiments. So too is the elevation of the film's central character and eponymous matriarch, Kay Miniver (Greer Garson), as a sort of folk-hero raised from the ashes of Teutonic aggression.

Opening one afternoon as Mrs. Miniver shops on the town, her world is filled with creature comforts, material wealth and relative insignificance. She is well regarded by her friends and neighbors and she's happily in love with her husband Clem (Walter Pidgeon) with whom she's produced three wonderful children.

When her eldest child Vin (Richard Ney) returns home on university holiday the family is made complete just as Vin meets the strong-willed Carol Beldon (Teresa Wright). The two fall in love much to the chagrin of her aristocratic grandmother Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty) although their romance is quickly interrupted by one of the film's central conceits. Namely, Carol challenges Vin, and the film's audience more generally, to put his book-learned idealism into practice by acting on what he believes rather than blithely pontificating as a college student forever and ever.

When England declares war on Germany the Minivers are instantly torn apart by the strains of being bombed on a daily basis while Clem works as a volunteer boatman and Vin enlists with the British Air Force. The times change from being centered on peaceful distractions and class distinctions to being focused on wartime rationing, radio broadcasts and national self-defense. Individual concerns are replaced by an emphasis on the country at large and the value of civilian sacrifice is put squarely at the center of the war effort alongside anticipated air assaults and land battles.

Quickly marrying Carol under the pressure of possibly dying in the skies, Vin sets off to his new duties as his father works the home front, helping to evacuate soldiers from Dunkirk among other assignments. In the mean time Mrs. Miniver keeps her family and close-knit community together as their homes and town buildings are bombed one by one into misshapen ruin.

Alone one morning she successfully disables a stranded German fighter pilot shot down over her village. Their confrontation is a tense one but she finds her way to safety with a mix of maternal instincts and her sense of self-preservation guided by a moral compass and not the blind zealotry expressed by the pilot who she takes into custody with the local police force.

After finally making friends with the standoffish Lady Beldon, Mrs. Miniver ends up as the binder of affection and support for all those around her until one night there is a terrible firefight in the sky. Leaving a party with Carol in tow the two women find themselves driving by moonlight so as not to attract attention. Unable to see they stop their car as the sky opens up with British planes engaging German bombers in a terrifying dogfight. Ducking to avoid strafing bullets Mrs. Miniver begins driving home no matter the risks but discovers her daughter-in-law has been shot from overhead gunfire.

Carol later dies in the Miniver living room waiting for an ambulance to arrive and it's this reversal of expectation that impacts the film with its second conceit. Though military personnel are expected to die in service of their country, it's the awful fact of war that all populations in the zone of conflict are subject to the often-random tragedy of death and destruction.

At Carol's memorial service in the village's bombed-out church Vin and Lady Beldon bond over their mutual loss. Unable to heal their son or their own sense of helplessness and loss the Minivers are casualties of war in having paid the price of non-combatants who lose their lives and property in defense of higher ideals. Then the service becomes a rallying cry for resistance to German aggression and so ends Wyler's picture with BAF forces framed in the missing roof of the church on their way to liberate freedom from the awful Fascist threat in the East.

Aside from the reversal of expectation about which character will die that ultimately results in Vin's survival and Carol's destruction, Mrs. Miniver is a well-made dramatic film with impressive performances and rich production value by MGM regulars Cedric Gibbons, Urie McCleary and Edwin B. Willis. The most remarkable thing about the picture, though, is its moment in time.

Produced in Hollywood during a moment when American involvement in the advancing World War was yet to be determined, it was first released to domestic audiences in June 1942. By then the American military machine was clearly allied against Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan. During its production phase, however, the Japanese bombing run over Pearl Harbor wasn't yet accomplished although the Battle of Britain was well underway with Hitler's Luftwaffe undertaking nightly bombing raids over English coastal cities and London herself. Collectively these facts suggest a few remarkable things about Wyler's Oscar-winner, not the least of which is its optimism and sense of eventual Allied victory.

At once wholly sympathetic to the British cause, Mrs. Miniver's focus on civilian sacrifice and its belief in the triumph of good over evil are recognizably tied to the necessities of the early 1940s. Though the theme of benevolence pre-dominating over unquenchable avarice and evil is one of the foundation myths of America, the second World War surely threw this idea into question, especially with the quick advancement of German forces across Europe beginning in 1939. From that point until the eventual armistice in 1945, World War II was a perpetual struggle between the aggressive fascism of a totalitarian, and hence repressive, regime and more republican, hence freer, democratic societies. But it was also a basic struggle for life and death with literally millions of people caught in the crossfire of warring nations.

Capitulating this struggle through the melodrama of a single family's struggle to remain buoyant in the most difficult of times, Wyler's Oscar-winner is masterful in its promotion of the American frontier ethic even in the face of long odds and impossible circumstances. That is, Hollywood envisioned an English family and village beset by the Battle of Britain and used it to advance optimistic notions about the triumph of good, God-fearing people like the Minivers in their struggle to triumph for a just cause. Never mind that World War II's outcome was far from known at the time of the film's production, Mrs. Miniver is that brand of popular entertainment precisely pitched to the ideological needs of its moment.

Promoting the struggles and difficulties of civilian life in a time of war, Mrs. Miniver demonstrates the necessity of this valiant fight balanced against all potential losses. In the clearest instance of this idea in the film, Vin is always considered the likely casualty of war. When the film's kills Carol instead as an accidental victim of a sky-bound dogfight, it emphasizes the point about how war effects everyone while also reaffirming her family's will to continue on despite such a devastating loss. Propagandistic in the extreme, Mrs. Miniver is equally an expert demonstration of cinematic technique through its realization of an adapted screenplay by George Froeschel, James Hilton, Claudine West and Arthur Wimperis, the cinematography of Joseph Ruttenberg and the special effects work of A. Arnold Gillespie, Warren Newcombe and Douglas Shearer.

Nominated against nine other films for the Outstanding Motion Picture Academy Award, Mrs. Miniver faced stiff competition from such notable movies as The Magnificent Ambersons, The Pride of the Yankees, Wake Island and Yankee Doodle Dandy. The lesser-known nominees not particularly in contention for the top award were The Invaders, Kings Row, The Pied Piper, Random Harvest and The Talk of the Town but the eventual winner was, and has always been, a likable choice within the Academy's sometimes spotty record. Certainly there could have been room in the list of the year's top films for the now-recognized classics Sullivan's Travels and Now, Voyager, yet no Oscar scandal was ever born in naming Greer Garson's starring vehicle as the movie of the year.

That contemporary audiences can easily dismiss some of the sentimentality and dramatic tension of Wyler's film is the price of new contexts and viewing circumstances. However, it should always be remembered that although Mrs. Miniver seems like a confident picture about the necessity of waging World War II, it was produced in a moment when this confidence and potential for success, in both Axis and Allied war rooms, was little more than a dream for military tacticians looking for an edge over their enemies the next country over. As Winston Churchill once inferred in his remarks about the picture, one purpose of responsible art and entertainment is to encourage the steely will necessary to resist aggression and champion the cause of justice and freedom. Another is to fortify doubts in the face of what's right and wrong and in this divide stands Wyler's picture about little people making the best of circumstances somehow out of their control.