Oscar-winning Greer Garson shines in this wartime classic about a Home Counties family and how it deals with the horrors and tragedies of war. She and kindly, patrician Walter Pidgeon made the perfect English couple in this stirring and heartwarming (if very simplistic) piece of propaganda which reminded the Americans that there was a war going on. By the time the film was released in 1942, they were all too well aware of it. Starting in 1939, scenes build to make a solid picture of a family at war. Marvellous stuff and Henry Wilcoxon, as the local vicar, gives it a fitting climax with a rousing speech from the pulpit. So moving was this speech that it was printed and leaflets were dropped over allied/enemy positions all during the war. So effective was the film that when Joseph Goebbels saw it, he called it 'an exemplary propaganda film for German industry to copy'. It won six Oscars and is arguably director William Wyler's best.

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