15. Greer Garson in 'Mrs Miniver' (1942)

Plot Intro

Kay Miniver (Greer Garson) lives her idyllic lifestyle with her husband, Clem (Walter Pidgeon), her grown-up son Vin (Richard Ney) and her two smaller children. She spends her time bantering with the servants and supporting train station conductors in flower shows- she’s awfully nice. Then, war hits! Vin goes off to serve, leaving his fiance (Teresa Wright), Clem gets involved in Dunkirk and Kay ends up performing acts of heroism that she never knew she could achieve.

Paul says...

We come to our fourth of eleven instances in which the Best Actress also starred in the Best Picture, so we’re already familiar with Mrs Miniver. I recalled its impossibly well-constructed speeches from its characters, its total preoccupation with inspiring audiences rather than exploring why we are fighting a war, and Garson’s stoic and sincere stares into the middle-distance. 

A second viewing found me enjoying this awfully British and awfully 1940s Oscar winner a whole lot more than previously. Perhaps I’ve grown more appreciative of pastoral life after 8 years living in a bustling city (and 5 months in Corona-lockdown). 

Or perhaps I was just in the mood for a film that does all the work for you, because Mrs Miniver is very easy viewing and great fun if you don’t think too much about it. Some scenes are very moving, especially the scene during an air raid in the bomb shelter in which every explosion and every jolt of the Minivers is felt intensely. It’s a very immersive scene which reminds even today’s audience that life in the countryside during this time was far more frightening and precarious than even under today’s pandemic. Similar tones are struck when Mr Miniver heads off in his boat to assist in the famous Dunkirk evacuation, although the tone is lost when Kay finds herself held hostage in her own home by a German parachutist. This latter scene feels immensely farfetched and more in line with society’s contemporary fears rather than real-life experiences.

The central romance between the Minivers’ self-righteous champagne-socialist son and the gutsy local gal is sweet without being cloying, and in fact explores the changing class system very well. Teresa Wright’s snobbish, aristocratic grandmother (played with wonderful Maggie Smith-ness by Dame May Whitty) disapproves but Kay reminds her in a very amusing and didactic scene that historically aristocratic families are not perfect or morally superior, and that in times of war everyone regardless of wealth and status is co-dependent in order to survive. This is further exemplified by the flower competition subplot in which snobby old Lady Beldon must allow a mere train conductor to win, and afterwards allows anyone who requires it to take shelter in her mansion’s cellar.

It’s all quite didactic but the film tackles these ridiculous class divisions at a time when society was soon to reset and bring up a new generation of baby boomers who would move even further away from arbitrary (and destructive) social hierarchies. 

Plus if you’re looking for some earnest acting then look no further than Garson. The woman is a statuesque, stone-faced juggernaut in the face of bombs, Nazis and the death of loved ones. Thankfully, it’s not tiresome at all and Garson is symbolic of the image of womanhood so prevalent in the age of war and Eleanor Roosevelt - stoic, resourceful, and dedicated entirely to the survival of her family.

There isn’t a massive amount to say about Garson, unfortunately. Her career was pretty much the early '40s, during which she received 5 consecutive nominations for Best Actress (a record only tied by Bette Davis at about the same time). She was a hugely popular box office draw but after the '40s her career became more understated on television.

Interestingly, her second of three marriages was to Richard Ney, who plays her son in Mrs Miniver and was 12 years younger than her. Apparently it was fraught with difficulty (probably a lot of unwanted publicity) and they divorced after 4 years. Her third marriage was to a Texas oilman and horse breeder with the very VERY Texas name of E.E. “Buddy” Fogelson so I imagine her retirement was very comfortable. She died in 1996 at 91. 

Whilst not one of the most noteworthy of Best Actress winners, Garson was huge in her time and Mrs Miniver is definitely her most quintessential work. It’s quaint and delicate even when a major character is killed off, but it’s a low-weight Sunday-afternoon treat.

Highlight

As before, the air raid scene is a work of art in itself. If you want to know what it might have been like hiding in those tiny Anderson shelters in the garden, then give it a watch.

Lowlight

The film is meant to be about an average family trying to “make ends meet” in times of war. But the big problem is that the Minivers are not a family you imagine struggling. They’re well-educated and wealthy. They have a son at Oxford and the opening scenes show Kay buying an expensive new hat and Clem buying an expensive new car, while both jokingly struggling to break the news of their frivolousness to the other. If the story was set in East London at the same time, we’d have something far grittier and more insightful.

Mark

7/10

Doug says...

So here we are again. Mrs Miniver last time round stuck in the memory as a Very Silly Film, filled with absurdist tales of German parachutists, oddly jostling against fascinating portrayals of Dunkirk and wartime flower festivals. It also ends - I remembered - with a Trying To Be Churchill speech that would have been good had the actor delivering it had any gravitas. Alas, he did not. 

But just as Paul found, I ended up enjoying this a lot more this time around. Perhaps it was the fact that we’d just come back from a very busy few days in Bristol and were worn out, or perhaps it was the glass of wine I quaffed, but I actually found myself really enjoying it this time around. Much of this is due to a very good and convincing cast hurling themselves into the fray, but I also enjoyed the gentle examination of class barriers breaking down and the climax of the film being a flower show with a storyline that Downton Abbey wouldn’t so much draw from as outright plagiarise. 

It’s fascinating too for simply being a living record. The film portrays Dunkirk but was made less than one year after the real Dunkirk. I constantly reminded myself that the audience watching this in the cinema were in the very war being depicted, and still had another two or three years to go. So while obviously it will be tinted a certain way (hello German parachutist saying overly threatening things about bombing everyone until they relent), the small details that usually are gotten wrong will be right - simply for it being that they still were the details at the time of filming. 

Greer Garson too acquits herself better than I thought the first time round. Perhaps it’s the blandness of Joan Fontaine last week, but here we have an actress in a similarly wishy-washy role, but Garson finds moments to show quiet amusement when her son is being outwitted by his future wife, or real cleverness when persuading her future mother in law to be alright with the marriage. These moments aren’t in the script, Garson manages to slip them in, moving Mrs Miniver away from being simply saintly, and more human and therefore interesting. 

The film for me belongs though to Dame May Whitty who manages to blunt the saccharine elements of her role and heighten the sharpness in a way that makes her much more amusing and scene stealing. She reminds me of Sara Allgood from How Green Was My Valley in the adeptness with which she blends the comic and tragic elements of her personal story arc. 

So while there are faults and cracks and moments of obvious patriotism that do jar a little, Mrs Miniver stands up a bit taller on a second viewing. Garson does a fine job and seeing her in the context of the other heroines from the past films, I actually applaud her for the subtle work she does in making Mrs Miniver less saintly and more real. 

Highlight

I really enjoy the whole flower show scene, as it builds comedically before leading into the tragic climax of the film. 

Lowlight

On rewatching, the German parachutist scene sticks out like a sore thumb. It’s not very well written and doesn’t match the realism of the rest of it. 

Marks

7/10

14. Joan Fontaine in 'Suspicion' (1941)

Plot Intro

Shy, dowdy Lina McLaidlaw (Joan Fontaine) lives a quiet countryside life with her wealthy, traditional parents. One day, she meets Johnnie Aysgarth (Cary Grant) on a train, a charming, rambunctious but irresponsible chap who offers her a more exciting life as her husband. The two very quickly get married despite the disapproval of Lina’s parents. Lina quickly comes to realise, however, that despite his affections Johnnie is penniless, an incessant gambler, and a pathological liar when it comes to his money situation. As their financial and marital situations becomes increasingly precarious, a good friend and business associate of Johnnie’s suddenly dies from alcohol poisoning, and Johnnie stands to benefit from the death. Lina becomes convinced that Johnnie murdered his friend- and that Johnnie is plotting to murder her too. 

Paul says...

Joan Fontaine is someone who may not appear on most “top 10 stars” lists but she is nonetheless a feature of Hollywood’s “Golden Age” and upon her death in 2013 she was one of the last remnants of that era. 

She was born in 1917 in Tokyo, where her father was an attorney and her mother was a retired actress, both were British. Her full name was the prestigious Joan de Beauvoir de Havilland, and her elder sister is the actress Olivia de Havilland, a two-time Best Actress winner (so we’ll be addressing her in more detail later), and one of the stars of Gone With the Wind with Vivien Leigh. When Fontaine was just two, her mother left her father because he employed the sexual services of geishas, and she took both children to California. De Havilland would eventually move back to Tokyo but Fontaine stayed in the US.

As an actress, their mother Lillian pushed them both to be performers too, but allegedly favoured Olivia which apparently sowed the seeds of discord between the two sisters. There are many rumours and stories related to this infamous sibling rivalry. We will uncover some of it in this blog post, and some more in our posts about de Havilland in the coming weeks, as there is a lot to write about. 

Fontaine had a range of supporting roles in movies from the mid-thirties, before landing the leading role in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1940 Best Picture winner, Rebecca. This made her a huge star, and she gained her first of three Best Actress nominations (she lost to Ginger Rogers in Kitty Foyle). 

The next year, she won for Suspicion, which I would personally describe as a “third tier Hitchcock”. On the top tier, you have classics such as Psycho and Rear Window; second tier possesses the lesser-known thrillers that deserve more recognition such as Strangers on a Train or The Lady Vanishes. Suspicion sits below them. You can see Hitchcock’s idiosyncratic skills and innovations, and the concept isn’t a bad one. But the film hasn’t stood the test of time at all.

The problem lies in the mawkish and terribly, terribly British script. The first hour feels more like a Noel Coward play, complete with cries of “Oh Johnnie, you cad!” and servants who says things like “fancy is as fancy does, but you can’t lead a horse to water”. Some sections feel more like a Harry Enfield sketch than a '40s thriller. 

It’s also hard to empathise with Lina’s belief that Johnnie is planning to kill her. He’s very evidently in love but by today’s standards he obviously suffers from anxiety, disenchantment and a gambling addiction. Whenever Lina sees him as cold or aggressive, it’s usually because something tragic has happened or she’s been dismissive to him first. Her conclusions are, quite frankly, ridiculous. Apparently, Hitchcock wanted it to be a lot darker but the studio refused to allow Cary Grant to be too much of a villain. If only they’d listened.

Grant does a great job as a man trying to be debonair and perfect but hiding a great deal of stress and feelings of inadequacy. I can see why Fontaine hurriedly marries him to escape her stodgy, pastoral life of fox hunts and Sunday church services. And Fontaine is fine although her character has nothing much to do other than stare wistfully at Johnnie and faint a couple of times. She’s better in screwball comedy The Women where her character may be meek (this seems to be her niche) but it’s done for laughs. 

Fontaine’s win for Suspicion is often analysed by biographers because not only did she defeat titans Bette Davis, Greer Garson and Barbara Stanwyck, but she also beat her own sister who had a slightly longer career than she at the time. Fontaine herself described herself as “appalled” that she had won, and rumours abounded that the friction between them that had existed since childhood had been exacerbated. One story (which Fontaine has denied) states that she rejected de Havilland’s attempts at congratulation at the Oscars ceremony. 

But throughout the '40s, '50s and '60s, their relationship seemed more cordial and they were seen together at similar parties, although neither spoke much about their relationship. Fontaine’s career stayed strong and she even set up her own production company, Rampart Productions, with her second husband. However, sisterly conflict seems to rise again upon the death of their mother in 1975, and we’ll go into that in more detail in our two blog posts about de Havilland coming very soon. 

Fontaine married and divorced four times and her second marriage produced her only biological child, Deborah. In 1951, she was in South America for a film festival where she met a four-year-old Peruvian girl called Martita. Fontaine arranged with Martita’s parents that she would be the girl’s legal guardian and take her to the USA for a more privileged life. As part of the arrangement, Martita was supposed to return to visit her parents in Peru at 16. Martita turned 16, Fontaine bought the ticket, but Martita refused to go. As a result, Fontaine stated that the two of them will remain estranged until Martita goes to Peru and as far as we know, nothing changed. 

Fontaine died in 2013 at the age of 96. Her elder sister, de Havilland, is remarkably still alive and kicking and recently celebrated her 104th birthday. Good genes! 

Highlight

Cary Grant’s performance, in my opinion, outshines Fontaine’s. You can see why she is attracted to someone who will help her escape her boring, privileged lifestyle, but you can also see a man wracked with an inability to settle and maintain stability due to his own upbringing. 

Lowlight

The ending is a massive disappointment. Hitchcock wanted something darker but alas his hands were tied. Had they let him make his own decisions, this may well have been a much more renowned film of his.

Mark

3/10

Doug says...

Joan Fontaine is one of those names where I recognise it and know she was a film star of sorts, but equally I have no real idea what she’s been in, what she looks like, and what her Unique Selling Point is. 

After watching this film, I’m none the wiser. It’s a half-assed Hitchcock where it seems to be building to some tremendous secret and then doesn’t have anything. Very Boy Who Cried Wolf realness. Cary Grant is trying, bless him, but again the writing is so weak that all he can do is be vaguely ominous and a bit shifty. It’s famous for a scene when Cary Grant carries a glass of milk that MIGHT be poisoned (spoiler, it isn’t) and Hitchcock put a light inside the milk so it glows ominously. 

But when a film is famous for a glass of milk, you might rightfully start to wonder how good it is. The problem is that Hitchcock wasn’t allowed to do what he should have - made Cary Grant an actual murderer and then deal with the fallout from that. Without any real villain, the whole thing becomes insubstantial and unimportant. 

At the centre of this is Fontaine who - frankly - isn’t very good. In fact I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t recognise her if I saw her again. It’s a bland, paint-by-numbers performance with no attempt to bring an edge to the role in a way that peers Joan Crawford, Bette Davis or Norma Shearer would have definitely have done. 

However there is one real highlight that elevates the film above the lowest mark. At one point Fontaine collapses in grief. She sways slightly before crumbling to her knees in the most overdone way possible. She then sits upright for a good five seconds before fully collapsing on a nearby chair, in a manner that suggests Fontaine had forgotten what she was meant to be doing and then suddenly remembered. It is such an amazing moment that I made Paul rewind so I could watch it again, cackling loudly. Unintentionally hilarious - yes, but a much-needed diversion from a dreary uninteresting film. 

Highlight

Fontaine’s chairography. 

Lowlight

A Hitchcock film sans real menace and a villain is…beige. 

Marks

2/10

13. Ginger Rogers in 'Kitty Foyle' (1940)

Plot Intro

Saleswoman Kitty Foyle (Ginger Rogers) finds herself struggling to decide between two men. Does she marry steady-going, kind-hearted doctor Mark Eisen (James Craig), or does she remarry her ex-husband, lovable, dashing, love-of-her-life socialite, Wyn Strafford (Dennis Morgan)? As she ponders on the decision, her life and relationships with both men are shown through flashback…

Paul says...

Now here’s a name you must know! Ginger Rogers was and still is Hollywood royalty, exuding huge influence in filmmaking thanks to her nine-movie partnership with Fred Astaire. Though this was her only Best Actress Oscar, her career remained strong and steady and in the '30s and '40s and she was a name that could make a very tidy profit for a movie. She’s listed by the American Film Institute as number 14 in their top actresses, higher than other Best Actress winners Vivien Leigh, Sophia Loren and Mary Pickford.

Rogers was born in 1911 as Virginia Katherine McMath (I see why she used a stage name) in Missouri. She had a turbulent start to her childhood as her parents separated and her father apparently kidnapped her twice before leaving her life forever. Despite this she was very close to her mother and grandparents- she bought a house in California for the latter so that they could be close to her when she was filming.

Rogers started in Vaudeville and Broadway, and her performance at 19 in the Gershwins’ musical Girl Crazy was so well received that she quickly headed down the path to Hollywood. After several well received movies, she met and teamed up with actor-singer-dancer Fred Astaire for nine movies between 1933 and 1939, the two most well-known being Top Hat and Swing Time. The two revolutionised movie musicals by incorporating seemingly-improvised and immensely elaborate dance routines into the songs and narrative. Even today, these scenes have the same awe-inspiring impact that Riverdance did when that first came on the scene. Astaire later commented on Rogers’ immense professionalism and resilience in movies that would usually drive exhausted and stressed performers to tears. 

The partnership ended for various reasons. Their last two movies lost money, mostly because musicals are expensive to make and audiences under the heavy hands of the Depression and oncoming war were too scarce to make profit. On top of that, Rogers was constantly paid much less than Astaire despite putting in the same or similar amounts of work, which remained a sore point for her (and justly so). 

Thankfully, Rogers had kept her hand in non-musical movies, which led her straight to Kitty Foyle. She defeated Hollywood heavyweights Bette Davis, Katharine Hepburn and next week’s winner, Joan Fontaine, to the prize, and the movie was nominated for Best Picture and Best Screenplay too.

I didn’t find it the most exciting of stories. A woman struggling to choose between two very similar-looking men doesn’t make for much drama unless one of them is an alien. The only real difference between them is that one is a bit of a cad and one is a bit dull but they’re both solid 9s, both genuinely love her and both have very sustainable incomes. It’s very first-world problems. Plus, some of the romantic dialogue scenes go on forever and ever and ever without really developing anything.  

I think I was also looking for some degree of fault in Kitty but there isn’t any. She’s steady-minded, sweet-natured and strong-willed. She would save a kitten from drowning but easily confront the person who threw it in the river (this is not a scene in the movie but it might as well have been). 

Thankfully, however, the movie steers clear of Frank Capra-style sentimentality, so it doesn’t have the tweeness of It’s A Wonderful Life. There is a genuine sense that despite Kitty’s good humour, she and her father need to use whatever resources they have to keep their heads above water. She’s not destitute, but she has to stay hardworking because the decimation of the Great Depression (which is mentioned a lot throughout) means everyone’s situation is precarious. 

Rogers is perfect for the role too. In the hands of the wrong actress it could have been a disaster. Garbo would have made her too self-pitying and Davis would have made her a stone-cold bitch. Rogers may not be playing a particularly interesting character, but she conveys what I presume is the “perfect post-Depression American woman” with admirable realism, displaying humour and kindness along with assertiveness and survival instincts. Without her, I think Kitty Foyle would be long forgotten as a product of early-'40s American optimism and survivalism. 

By the late '40s and '50s, Rogers’ career was moving more into Broadway again due to the horrendous scarcity of older female characters in Hollywood. But her performances were consistently well received, particularly in Hello Dolly! and Mame. Rogers was a lifelong Republican (which nowadays is enough to tarnish anyone’s name) and openly opposed FDR in the mid-'40s. She married (and subsequently divorced) five different men but never had children. She died in 1995 at the age of 83. 

Highlight

After Kitty elopes with and marries Wyn, she goes to meet his very wealthy family, only to find that they are uncomfortable with the marriage due to conditions on his trust fund. She furiously confronts them about in a scene where we were genuinely cheering her on. Post-Depression America must have loved seeing the perturbed expressions on the rich people’s faces.

Lowlight

There are several lengthy romantic scenes between Kitty and either Mark or Wyn which could have been cut down significantly.

Mark

5/10

Doug says...

I did not hold out fast hopes for Kitty Foyle seeming - as it did from its cover - to be another sentimental story representing women in ways that feel antiquated today (see The Divorcee for example). 

However I was pleasantly surprised. Ginger Rogers turns in a naturalistic, thought-through performance as Kitty, a woman on the cusp of a vital decision, stopping in a hotel room to think through her past. The two paths before her are to become the mistress of the man she has loved for many years, or to marry the good-natured doctor who is besotted with her. 

Rogers handles it sublimely, showing the iron will of the woman beneath the surface, and drawing the viewers’ affection from the off. She is - on purpose - a normal working woman, trying to get by despite the 1930s Great Depression. It’s the first time I think we’ve really seen this period explored (save It Happened One Night), and scenes such as the three women sharing a two room apartment, and Kitty as a shopgirl are terrific. There is no high faluting grandiosity along the lines of Jezebel here, and the plot even deals with things like pregnancy out of wedlock, and extra-marital affairs. It’s cutting close to the bone for the prim and proper nature of plots from the era. 

Where this film excels for me though is in its innovation in film-making. In one scene Kitty speaks to her reflection who reacts a la Mary Poppins, and the editing is seamless. Constant time-shifts are shown by a snowglobe close up with eerie voice overs (hello Citizen Kaine). The film opens with a very funny montage discussing the role of women in society over the past fifty years, which also lays out a key theme in how Foyle is a new, modern type of woman. 

I was drawn in a little by the romances and Kitty’s loving relationship with her father, but really the long romantic scenes do start to harken back to the overwritten indulgent scenes from a few years before. Where this film stands out is in how fresh some moments are - whether it’s Kitty fake-fainting to pretend she didn’t pull the burglar alarm in the department store where she works, or Doctor Mark forcing her to play cards all night instead of going out to dinner because he doesn’t have a dime. 

One other scene worth mentioning is when Kitty meets Wyn’s family as they are planning to get married. There is no particular villain, but his mother revealing Kitty will need to go to finishing school is handled superbly with Kitty’s anger feeling genuine and legitimate. It’s well done by every actor in the scene. 

Ultimately, although it pulls a few punches (a ‘fortunate’ miscarriage? In the original novel it was an abortion), this feels a great deal fresher than a lot of the films we’ve been seeing so far. 

Highlight

The scene where Kitty and her two flatmates knowingly stage-manage the date with Dr Mark. It stands out as a real examination of how unmarried working women navigated the unchartered ground of living during the Depression. It’s fascinating. 

Lowlight

Pulling its punches may have been the only way it got made in the ‘40s, but it would have been remarkable with a bit more grit. 

Marks

7/10