Mrs. Miniver was Hollywood's emotional salute to the courage of the British people under siege. In 1942, there wasn't a dry eye in the house when it swept the country as the year's most popular film; while the on-screen British kept their upper lips stiff through blitz and bother alike, the lips of American audiences were free to quiver unequivocally. In its portrait of the effect of the war on the “average” British family, Mrs. Miniver's propaganda value was worth many battleships, said Winston Churchill; FDR credited the film with greatly aiding the American mood of sympathy and self-sacrifice for Britain; and even Goebbels cited it as a useful example for his own propaganda industry. Greer Garson and Walter Pidgeon star as the peaceable rural English couple--the graceful and unflappable Mrs. Miniver and her good-natured sport of a husband, Clem--whose lives are torn apart by the war which lands in their back yard. Wyler's sympathetic sense of wartime British--the “we can take it” spirit--is essentially accurate and is evident even in more realistic films on the subject, like Noel Coward's In Which We Serve. What rings false in Mrs. Miniver today--and also kept several contemporary critics at arm's length from the film--is its portrait of England as a nation of gentry, with a nod to the tribulations of their servants. From Mrs. M. gallantly reading her children to sleep in a bomb shelter, to Mr. M. taking his motor launch as far as Dunkerque in a pinch, to their oldest son, an Oxford student, joining the RAF, Mrs. Miniver is less a picture of “the people” at war than of the lives of the near-noble being rudely and unforgivably interrupted. That being said, transport yourself back to 1942...and have a good cry.