Mrs. Miniver

I watched Mrs. Miniver yesterday morning, while I was home knitting a scarf and trying not to feel the cold I'm catching.

Mrs. Miniver
1942
Greer Garson
Walter Pidgeon
Teresa Wright
Richard Ney

I popped this into the DVD player on my laptop, and then went to the kitchen to make myself a cup of hot cocoa - I didn't have any orange juice, and the cocoa seemed like the next best thing to make the cold feel better. Or that was my justification - really, it just sounded like a good idea on a cold winter day.

So I get my cocoa nice and hot and come back out to the living room, and the movie is already playing on my laptop (it started itself automatically). And who do I see on my screen? Clarence, the angel from It's a Wonderful Life! Which I had just finished watching before putting this DVD in, by the way. So I was all, "Hey Clarence! Congratulations on your wings! I didn't know you were in this movie, too!"

I like Clarence. I always have bells on my Christmas trees now, because of that movie.

Anyway, back to Mrs. Miniver. It's the story of a family in England during WWII. (Okay, I just wrote that, and then doubted myself, because the movie came out in 1942, so WWII wasn't exactly a long ago historical event at the time, but I remember them mentioning Nazis, and buying a car that was from the late 30s or early 40s, so it had to be WWII. Okay, doubting moment over.)

Mrs. Miniver and her husband go through the war years, their oldest son enlisting in the RAF (Royal Air Force) and fighting in the war, as they stay home and spend nights in a bomb shelter with their younger kids and their son's cat, Napoleon. It was a very enjoyable movie, that I feel like I'm doing a bad job talking about. It's hard to talk about a movie without giving too much away!

But I can tell this much more. The son falls in love with a girl from town, and her grandmother is a nasty old woman, but Mrs. Miniver and her son totally win her over. And there is a flower show every year, and Clarence, whose name is something else in this movie, but I'm still calling him Clarence, grew a red rose that he named after Mrs. Miniver, because she was so nice to him all the time. He entered this rose in the flower show, against the old lady's rose. And this is a competition that the old lady has never lost. Ooh! Exciting. :) It was sweet, though, actually. It gave the old lady's character room to grow in a nice, heart warming way.

And there are bombs and people getting shot, and a wounded German ending up in the Miniver's kitchen, and just all kinds of excitement. It was a very good movie, and an enjoyable one to watch while I was sitting home knitting on a snowy Sunday. I give it 4 out of 5 stars.