Why did The Corner’s unofficial chaplain, Fr. George Rutler recommend Mrs. Miniver as the best conservative movie? Over the past few nights we settled the children down in the playroom to watch Mrs. Miniver together (bedtime for our youngest boy comes too early to have allowed us to see the movie in a single sitting) and I think I know:

The movie contains no bombast, ideology, or oratory (the sermon in the final scene represents the sole exception, but if you’re going to shoot a vicar in a pulpit, then he has to preach). Instead the movie portrays England through the eyes of a single family, sacrificing for each other, their neighbors, their village. Their values–liberty, decency, kindness–are, so to speak, incarnate. The Minivers concern themselves not with political abstractions but with the English way of life as it is actually lived–and lived, above all, in the family home.

Which gives me the opportunity to bring out my favorite quotation from Samuel Johnson once again: “To be happy at home is the ultimate end of all ambition.” I have no idea whether William Wyler, who directed Mrs. Miniver, Walter Pidgeon, who played Mr. Miniver, or Greer Garson, who played Mrs. Miniver herself, ever thought of themselves as conservatives. But they understood Dr. Johnson’s insight, all right.

How’d I do, Fr. Rutler?