Mrs. Miniver and The Nun's Story

I made this picture and I didn't know what I was doing.
--William Wyler on Mrs. Miniver (1942)

His neatness and decorum constitute his greatest artistic defects.
--Andrew Sarris on Fred Zinnemann, The American Cinema; Directors and Directions 1929-1968 (The University of Chicago Press 1968).

Wyler and Zinnemann are listed in Sarris's book as "less than meets the eye."  Also included in this category is Billy Wilder, whom Sarris threatened to move to a more positive category, possibly because of the beautiful, funny, and not-so-cynical movies Wilder made after Sarris's book was published:  The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1970) and Avanti (1972).  But Wyler and Zimmerman never redeemed themselves.  I would like to say, however, in this day and age when my local movie house shows mostly crude animation, violent action and horror, and unfunny gross comedies the civilized dramas of Wyler and Zinnemann give one much pleasure.  I recently watched Wyler's Mrs. Miniver and Zinnemann's The Nun's Story on Turner Classic movies and was impressed by the grace under pressure of the title characters:  Greer Garson confronting a Nazi in her British kitchen and Audrey Hepburn confronting her doubts in Africa.  Nor should one forget that Wyler and Zinnemann made some exciting pictures before they got bogged down in epics during the demise of the studio system.  Wyler made Dodsworth, an intelligent and moving film about marriage and fidelity (1936  from the Sinclair Lewis novel) and the delightfully droll The Good Fairy (1935, from a Preston Sturges script), while Zinnemann made the sensitive films Act of Violence(1950) and The Men(1950), both dealing with the dark aftermath of WWII.