Three classic Oscar winners come to Blu-ray

Mrs. Miniver is another of those classic films that I’ve never seen until now, but it was never on my radar to begin with. While watching the melodrama set in England before and during the bombings of World War II by the Germans, I discovered a pleasant film that really played more as a soap opera with the war in the background, and class warfare taking front and center until the bombings start. The story focuses on the Miniver family, particularly the missus (Greer Garson) who is the most beautiful woman in the land, so beautiful that the lowly station manager names a rose after her. It’s that rose that brings out the worst in Lady Beldon (Dame May Whitty), who enters her own rose into the flower competition — which she sponsors — and always wins. But fate intervenes as Mrs. Miniver’s son and Lady Beldon’s granddaughter meet and fall in love, and with their homeland under attack, Lady Beldon has to let down her walls when considering which rose is the more beautiful. It’s all a series of pleasantries — though there are several jumps in time that are jarring, such as when you discover Vin Miniver and Carol Beldon have gotten married — until the bombings hit very close to home, bringing tragic deaths and giving the film’s finale a bit more weight than expected (I did find myself tearing up during the final scene in the town’s bombed-out church). The film definitely belongs to the second-billed Garson (Walter Pidgeon is top-billed, but his role as the husband is more of a supporting character), with the camera lingering on her expressive face in loving close-ups.

It seems surprising that the film won Best Picture (along with five more awards including Best Actress), but coming at a time of war, it certainly plays on a sense of American patriotism even if the movie is set in England (the end credits include a message about buying war bonds), so it turns out to not be so surprising after all even with competition from The Magnificent Ambersons, Kings Row, Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Pride of the Yankees in the mix (ten films were nominated that year). The new Blu-ray edition is a lovely presentation of the film, doing justice to Joseph Ruttenberg’s black and white cinematography and giving the image an appropriate film-like quality, preserving the grain as it should be. The image is so good that you can clearly see the wires guiding a downed aircraft to its crash landing (but the effects of planes and an armada of boats on their way to Dunkirk is still mighty impressive). The audio is crisp and clear, and even in DTS-HD MA 1.0, those scenes of roaring planes and rumbling boats still packs some power.

The standard definition extras show how committed Hollywood was to the war effort at the time. These include:

• Mr. Blabbermouth — (19 minutes) A short propaganda film dramatizing an editorial from the Los Angeles Daily News showing the danger of spreading rumors about the war, particularly the destruction of the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.
  
• For the Common Defense — (21 minutes) An entry in MGM’s “Crime Does Not Pay” series is meant to illustrate the value of international cooperation between police forces, here between the U.S. and Chile (the subject of the war is barely touched upon, but is clearly something happening in the background)
• Blitz Wolf — (10 minutes) This is one of those “forbidden” Warner Brothers cartoons that the studio has been reluctant to pull out of the vaults due to the sometimes racist nature of the characters. In fact, they go out of their way to apologize for the short’s racist content while admitting that keeping these things under wraps only serves to pretend that these attitudes never existed (are you listening, Walt Disney Corporation?). Oddly enough, this is probable the least racist cartoon of the era, depicting Hitler as a wolf speaking with a German accent no more offensive than the ones used on Hogan’s Heroes twenty-five years later. If nothing else, it is an interesting bit of history and Warners is to be commended for allowing this to be included on the disk (the short was nominated for an Oscar, but lost to Disney’s own propaganda piece Der Fueher’s Face)
• 1942 Academy Awards newsreel — (1 minute) Features Greer Garson’s Best Actress acceptance speech, which set a record for its length!
• Theatrical trailer (2+ minutes)

These three films are a real treasure trove for movie buffs and come highly recommended as repeat or first-time viewing experiences.

These reviews are based on retail copies of the Blu-rays provided to CliqueClack by Warner Home Video.