One World, Big Screen: Hollywood, the Allies, and World War II

4. Kissing Cousins: How Anglo-American Relations Became “Special”

 A family—mother, father, and two small children —huddles in an underground bomb shelter buried in the yard of their English country home. The year is 1940, and the Battle of Britain rages overhead. The shelter’s walls quiver, and debris falls as German bombs explode nearby. Although frightened, the members of the group survive the onslaught without serious injury.Others are not so fortunate, however, as is soon discovered: a close relative lies dead, and the family’s home, a universal symbol of safety and comfort, suffers heavy damage.That memorable scene helped Mrs. Miniver (1942), MGM’s portrait of a fictional English family’s wartime travails, resonate among American viewers in a way few other films could match. Winner of six Academy Awards, including Best Picture, it was the highest-grossing movie in the studio’s storied history to that point. Aside from its compelling narrative, stellar performances, and overall quality, Mrs. Miniver’s political subtext earned it wide acclaim. Its central motif of family, symbolic of Great Britain and threatened by the Axis enemy, not only framed the Allies’ war as a defense of that dear if vulnerable institution but also positioned the Anglo-American alliance as a community of kinfolk. An MGM promotional trailer spoke to precisely those themes, encouraging viewers to identify with their besieged transatlantic cousins by breathlessly proclaiming the Minivers “brave and decent people whose courage is the flaming spirit of a family of brave and decent nations.”    -         The idea that Anglo-American relations were so uncommonly close as to be “special” acquired unquestionable currency in the popular culture of World War II, and Americans’ embrace of Atlanticism was part and parcel of the broader sea change that occurred in their cosmology. That assessment is not mere sentimentality, and it neither denies that the alliance rested on corresponding national agendas—on realpolitik— nor suggests that it was devoid of conflict.1 Rather, precisely those differences , which encompassed issues ranging from film trade to geopolitical strategy, necessitated a propaganda campaign, so closely coordinated as to be neither strictly American nor solely British but Anglo-American,2 to foster an impression of international harmony. Propagandists charged cinema, a persuasive if slower medium, with taking the long view and situating diplomacy within a politicized context that would be meaningful , entertaining, and successful at the box office. Films romanticized the hard-boiled Anglo-American entente as a family of nations. All manner of wartime cinematic discourse—from Hollywood love stories to documentaries valorizing the fraternity of joint combat to newsreels highlighting President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s intimacy with Prime Minister Winston S. Churchill—publicized bilateral affairs, which displayed “some of the tension and tortuousness of family relationships,” according to historian H. C. Allen, a pioneering chronicler of transatlantic ties.3 In so doing, a sort of on-screen Anglo-American fantasyland emerged. Staged by Hollywood producers and vetted by government propagandists , it enlivened foreign affairs, interpreted reality, and framed the Allies’ common interests in movie language—that is, as values shared among members of an extended family of peoples joined by ancestry, marriage, and/or friendship. The illusion proved salient and enduring. Indeed, the idea that Americans and Britons shared a “special relationship” was a direct outgrowth of the wartime experience—Churchill coined the term in 1943 and would go on to hail the “Grand Alliance” in his influential memoirs —and far outstripped any residual distrust to provide an intellectual basis for the postwar transatlantic alliance that still exists.4 Mrs. Miniver propagated the Anglo-American kinship narrative, a discourse nourished by the ongoing United Nations campaign. The movie originated as part of the interventionist lobbying effort prior to Pearl Harbor . Begun in October 1940 and filmed in the autumn of 1941, it was already in the pipeline when the United States entered the war in December and joined the UN in January 1942. Although the film’s initial purpose may have been overtaken by events, Mrs. Miniver’s domestic drama reverberated all the more after its release in June, by which time Ameri- Mrs. Miniver (Greer Garson) and Clem Miniver (Walter Pidgeon) head a British family, besieged but resolute, in MGM’s Mrs. Miniver, the Oscar winner as ’s Best Picture. Photofest/© MGM.    cans could better relate to their new overseas ally for having firsthand experience with the war’s disruptive effects on family life. Paradoxically, the fictional Minivers, Hollywood’s creations, enabled U...