7.7 | / 10 |
Users | 5.0 | |
Reviewer | 4.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
The Minivers, an English "middle-class" family experience life in the first months of World War II. While dodging bombs, the Miniver's son courts Lady Beldon's granddaughter. A rose is named after Mrs. Miniver and entered in the competition against Lady Beldon's rose.
Starring: Greer Garson, Walter Pidgeon, Teresa Wright, Dame May Whitty, Reginald OwenDrama | 100% |
Romance | 88% |
War | 34% |
Video codec: MPEG-4 AVC
Video resolution: 1080p
Aspect ratio: 1.37:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.37:1
English: DTS-HD Master Audio Mono (48kHz, 24-bit)
French: Dolby Digital Mono
Italian: Dolby Digital Mono
German: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono
Spanish: Dolby Digital Mono (Spain)
English SDH, French, German SDH, Italian SDH, Spanish, Korean
50GB Blu-ray Disc
Single disc (1 BD)
Region A, B (C untested)
Movie | 4.5 | |
Video | 5.0 | |
Audio | 3.0 | |
Extras | 2.5 | |
Overall | 4.5 |
Legendary director William Wyler won the first of his three directing Oscars for this unabashedly patriotic celebration of the durability of ordinary British citizens facing the Nazi blitz. (The other two were for Ben Hur and The Best Years of Our Lives.) Like many of Hollywood's early pioneers, Wyler was an immigrant to America, a German Jew by birth whose name was originally spelled "Weiler". His interest in directing Mrs. Miniver stemmed from a profound conviction that his adopted land should not be sitting on the sidelines while Hitler's war machine pummeled the rest of Europe. Conceived in 1940, the film was intended to show the conflict as one affecting every man, woman and child, but by the time Mrs. Miniver reached theaters in June 1942, America had already entered the war. Still, Wyler's efforts did not go to waste. The rousing speech that closes the film was reprinted in Time and Life, broadcast on the Voice of America and printed on pamphlets dropped over Europe from Allied planes. Winston Churchill famously said that Mrs. Miniver did more for the war effort than a flotilla of destroyers. The source for the film was a series of English newspaper columns written for The Times of London by Jan Struther about a fictional English housewife. The columns were published in book form in 1939, but Wyler's film bore little resemblance to the book other than borrowing the title and a general notion of the title character. Four screenwriters labored to create a portrait of the Miniver family and their village as war casts its shadow over their lives. With the luminous Greer Garson in the title role and Wyler's notorious perfectionism applied to every aspect of the production, the result was an unforgettable portrait of how England fought the war in every corner of the homefront, as well as on the battlefields.
Mrs. Miniver was one of four Oscars awarded to Joseph Ruttenberg, one of old Hollywood's distinguished cinematographers and an acknowledged master of black-and-white images. (His other credits include Gaslight and The Philadelphia Story.) Warner's 1080p, AVC-encoded Blu-ray demonstrates yet again the studio's commitment to producing superior, film-like transfers for catalog titles from the golden age of the studio system. The source material is in excellent shape, and images are sharp and detailed without any evidence of artificial sharpening, grain reduction or other electronic manipulation. A very fine, natural grain pattern is discernible in the image, but one must be looking closely to see it. This is grain as it should be resolved on Blu-ray. Blacks are crisply, solidly black, and the various shades of gray are finely delineated, providing a sense of depth that is sometimes almost tactile. Contrast is never overstated, and I never once noticed any kind of artifact.
Mrs. Miniver's original mono soundtrack is presented as DTS-HD MA 1.0, and it is as good as the original source allows. Although the dynamic range is somewhat limited, the various sequences of aerial bombardment register with surprising power, as does a sequence involving several downed aircraft. Voices are clear, but some of the English regional accents were so thick that I had to consult the subtitles on occasion, which is unusual for me. The old-fashioned score by Herbert Stothart (The Yearling) might have better fidelity with a contemporary recording, but it could hardly sound more heartfelt.
The Blu-ray includes most of the supplements from Warner's 2004 DVD (omitting only a photo gallery) and adds a new one (the Blitz Wolf cartoon).
Walter Pidgeon may have been listed first in the credits, but Mrs. Miniver belongs to Greer Garson. Anyone could have played the character with traditional English reserve, but Garson did something much more difficult and essential to the film's impact. Her Mrs. Miniver remains unflappable, even when she's staring down the barrel of a German pistol, but she also brims with emotion that the camera can see passing across Garson's face, even if no one else around Mrs. Miniver happens to notice. (One gets the sense that Ballard, the stationmaster, notices, particularly during the scene when he encounters her by the riverbank, anxiously scanning the waters for her husband's boat.) To watch Kay Miniver stand firm for her family is to witness a special kind of patriotism, one that says almost nothing but simply gets on with doing what needs to be done. Churchill was right. Highly recommended.
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