HotToastyRag Wendy Hiller plays the title character, a devout missionary in the Salvation Army always trying to help and do good. A very young Rex Harrison witnesses one of her conversion speeches on the street, and so entranced by her beauty and passion, he joins the troupe. Before long they're engaged, but the story's just started! Barbara's estranged father, Robert Morley, returns to the scene and tries to buy his way back into the family by donating a small fortune to the Salvation Army-Barbara won't have it! And while she's busy volunteering with her aide Deborah Kerr, an unrepentant and mean-spirited sinner, Robert Newton, repeatedly causes trouble for everyone.Wendy Hiller does a very good job as the tireless Major Barbara, and Robert Newton is always a very frightening bad guy, but Rex Harrison absolutely ruins this movie. His ego oozes off the screen, and his horrific mannerisms and flippant deliveries made me want to run out of the room screaming. I didn't think I could dislike him any more than I already had in My Fair Lady, but I was proved wrong.Even without the terrible excuse for a romantic lead, the story of Major Barbara is pretty boring. Deborah Kerr has a very small role, and Robert Newton's character is the best part of the movie. Rather than this through this 2-hour snore-fest, rent Separate Tables, Elmer Gantry, and 1948's Oliver Twist instead.Kiddy Warning: Obviously, you have control over your own children. However, there's a scene where Robert Newton strikes Deborah Kerr and a little old lady, and while some kids might not understand what's going on, it might be upsetting to watch. So, I wouldn't let my kids watch it.

SimonJack George Bernard Shaw's three-act play, "Major Barbara," premiered on the stage in 1905 London. It wasn't made into a movie until this film came out in 1941. Shaw was involved with the film and wrote some additional material for it. The story has three main elements. One is the Salvation Army and caring for the poor on the streets of London. Another is related – advocates follow God and serve him in their service to those poor. And the third is industry that provides jobs so that people don't wind up poor and on the streets. In this case, it's specifically the munitions industry. This is a wonderful movie with witty dialog. It is well written, directed, filmed and acted by the entire cast. And what a cast! Rex Harrison is Adolphus Cusins, Robert Morley is Andrew Undershaft, Robert Newton is Bill Walker, Sybil Thorndike is The General, Marie Lohr is Lady Britomart, Deborah Kerr is Jenny Hill and Wendy Hiller is Major Barbara. Hiller gives a performance worthy of an Oscar. But, she didn't even get a nomination; nor did the film receive any awards recognition. The film came out in the summer of 1941. England was at war. It had survived and won the Battle of Britain in the skies over England the year before. It had been pushed off the continent at Dunkirk on June 4, 1940. And, it was engaged in a massive land war against Germany in North Africa. Many women and children had died in the London bombings, and in the German conquest of Europe. Thousands of soldiers and sailors already had lost their lives. America was not yet in the war, but the Western world was feeling the ravages of war.Now comes a movie – a comedy, no less – based on a Bernard Shaw play with a strange message. It says that munitions manufacturing is better for society than the charitable works of the Salvation Army and similar groups. The reasoning is that the factory work feeds, clothes and shelters people so they don't wind up on the street. But the charitable work just provides soup and a cot for a night's sleep, and the people remain downtrodden the next day. I don't deny that Shaw had good intentions in pointing out the value of business providing jobs versus charities feeding people out of work. But, it's also plain that Shaw is poking fun at the Christian charitable groups. His satire is as plain as day. One must remember that Shaw was a professed atheist. Most atheists, like agnostics, Christians or followers of any other belief, are content just to hold their views and let the other fellow have his. But, professed atheists are different. It is their "duty" or need to put down any beliefs contrary to their own. Similarly, zealous Christians know their calling is to spread the good news. The Salvation Army was born in London in 1865. William Booth founded it as the East London Christian Mission. Then, in 1878, he reorganized the mission as the Salvation Army. He gave it a military structure and became the first General. When Shaw wrote his play in the early 20th century, the Salvation Army had spread around the world. So, Shaw pokes fun at the Salvation Army (and other Christian charitable groups). Those who deny any satire fail to see or understand Shaw's glaring exaggeration. When Andrew leads Barbara, Adolphus and others on the tour of his huge munitions complex, he takes them to a workers' housing community. Isn't it marvelous? Nice new homes and whole neighborhoods laid out with parks and playgrounds for the children. I'd like to know where such model communities exist in any industrial country. Surely they're not in England or America. Nor were there any Communist countries in the world that provided such model accommodations for their workers. So, just where was this great beneficence of the munitions industry in Great Britain? There have been company housing plots in coal mining areas and others, but they are more indentured than ideal communities.Yet, the ending message of this play is that the Undershaft munitions industry was more beneficial to the public and individual people than the Salvation Army. But that message flew in the face of the reality of the times. The exaggerated satire was lost on the public at a time when churches and charitable groups were rising to help care for the homeless, orphaned, hungry and lost millions that were being created by war. And that war, incidentally, was made possible by the endless supply of munitions from the Undershafts of the world. As it turned out, Shaw's social satire was doomed by the reality of events of the time. Shortly after he wrote his play, the world plunged into World War I. Right when the play was made into this superb movie, the world was beginning to feel the ravages of World War II. So, Shaw won his point in his play, but he lost it on the stage of real life. All that aside, today we should look at this film and see the comedy, the satire and the contradictions. And enjoy some stupendous performances. We should enjoy seeing Rex Harrison beating the bass drum for the Army band. Or see the demure Deborah Kerr in her movie debut. Wendy Hiller's role was refreshingly convincing and uplifting. Even when she had a change of conscience toward the end. Which, by the way, was not so convincing to audiences — again, because of the war taking place. Hiller gave a superb performance. She finally did receive an Oscar – in 1959. She won best supporting actress for her role in "Separate Tables" of 1958.

nk_gillen George Bernard Shaw's 1905 satirical examination of salvation, "Major Barbara," is updated in this 1941 screen translation, but the story is basically the same. Munitions industrialist Andrew Undershaft, who has not seen his family in almost 20 years, returns to find that: (a) his son Stephen, at 25, has not discovered a suitable vocation; (b) his daughter Sarah has engaged herself to a pretentious but unoffending young fool, Charles Lomax; and (c) his other daughter Barbara has adopted the Salvation Army as a career toward moral self-fulfillment and social enlightenment.The essential question in "Major Barbara" concerns the root of the Industrial Age's social ills. Barbara (well-acted by Wendy Hiller) would argue that the greed of whiskey manufacturers and the social rapacity of the ruling classes are the culprits. Her father, on the other hand, maintains that civilization's greatest sin is the existence of poverty. Further, he deplores the shameless glorification of the "meek, honest, and downtrodden" poor and the empty condescension that is offered to those who live in filth, disease, and constant hunger. And since Andrew Undershaft is the play's hero and Shaw's philosophical stand-in (Robert Morley, the actor who plays him, is even made up to resemble Shaw), there can be little doubt as to which character, father or daughter, will ultimately triumph.Since Shaw was directly involved in this project, it's doubtful that purists will object to the fact that the film includes additional scenes that did not appear in the play's original text. A new prologue introduces us to Adolphus Cusins (Rex Harrison), the professor of Greek classics who is a dismal failure as a Hyde Park lecturer. When his speeches fail to hold or entrance an audience, he is advised by a sympathetic street patrolman (Stanley Holloway) to sample the "religious" speaking-circuit. Deciding he has nothing to lose, Adolphus heeds the policeman's advice, and while doing so, he encounters Barbara speaking to a crowd with incredibly religious fervor, and he is instantly smitten. From there, the movie segues into Shaw's original First Act.Another important addition is the mock religious conversion of the drunken Bill Walker by wrestler-turned-Salvation-Army-sergeant Todger Fairmile, a scene only described in Shaw's original transcript. Robert Newton, a very fine actor who was especially memorable in Hitchcock's "Jamaica Inn" (1939), here plays Walker as an unbridled, unapologetic savage of a bully. His profane dismissals of the aged Miss Mitchens and the quickness of his physical abuse of the docile Army volunteer Jenny Hill provide the film's most shocking moments. But Walker's more lethal ammunition is used in his verbal taunting of Barbara ("What price Salvation, now?") after her disillusionment with and ultimate resignation from the Army of Good Samaritans. So deep is her despair that she almost commits suicide.Her abandonment of the Army occurs after her superior accepts a large gift of money in the form of a check signed by her own father. Barbara insists that the money is tainted, that its blood money, gleaned from her father with the sweat of his underpaid workers and by the misery suffered by the victims of Undershaft's armaments industry. However, when reluctantly following up on her father's invitation to visit his munitions plant, she discovers that Undershaft's company town is a working-man's suburban paradise of modern architecture and schools and churches; and she then understands that it is not her father who drives the hellish multimillion-dollar business that makes this Eden possible. It drives him. And the film's concluding shot of Cusins, Walker, and Barbara, marching arm-in-arm with the rest of Undershaft's proletariat, is a celebration of the playwright's ironic vision.Shaw is primarily enjoyed for the intelligent wit of his dialogue, but he had a serious purpose here. As the playwright himself reflected in 1906, a year after the play's premiere, "Undershaft...is simply a man who, having grasped the fact that poverty is a crime, knows that when society offered him the alternative of poverty or a lucrative trade in death and destruction, it offered him (a choice) between energetic enterprise and cowardly infamy."Gabriel Pascal produced and directed – adequately. Here, his style is very understated and completely serviceable to the film's source. The scenes are paced briskly, even by modern standards. And the casting is superb, particularly Emlyn Williams's two-faced cynic/beggar, Snobby Price (the name says it all); Deborah Kerr is an affecting Jenny Hill (she obtained this film role by reciting the Lord's Prayer for producer Pascal); Torin Thatcher is in fine comic form as Todger Fairmile; and Marie Lohr manages to quietly hit all the right notes as Undershaft's priggish wife, Lady Britomart.

Mankin "Major Barbara (1941: **1/2). A lot of talent has gone into this film version of Shaw's play about a Salvation Army lass who is disillusioned when her Mission accepts a fat check from her father, a wealthy munitions manufacturer of wartime supplies. I happened to have the play on hand and referred back to it as I wasn't sure Shaw's meanings survived the rather tedious verbosity of the movie, which sags despite a great cast (Wendy Hiller, Rex Harrison, Robert Morley, etc.). Shaw seems to be saying that when religion and capitalism fight it out, capitalism will always win as it provides jobs and shelter for the poor, whereas all religion can do is to concentrate on saving their souls. To Shaw, a man's soul is best saved when his belly is full and his future is secured. Ultimately, the girl decides it's better to labor in her father's vast factory, where she can save souls while working within the system. I believe Shaw was something of a Utopian Socialist. He called this play a "Discussion in Four Acts" and that's pretty much what the movie seemed to be.