Sidney Bernstein, Baron Bernstein would help the new Allies, Britain and America, to understand each other. He read and advised on early drafts of "Mrs. Miniver" (1942), the film starring Greer Garson as the heroic mother of a wartorn British family, which MGM made after a meeting of MGM executives with Bernstein in Hollywood. As the invasion of France loomed, Bernstein brought his friend Alfred Hitchcock back from Hollywood to Britain to work on two short documentary films for the post-invasion French audience. As the war wound to its close, Bernstein heard the first reports of extermination camps, visited Belsen himself, and was determined
Louis B. Mayer the top box office hit of 1942. President Franklin D. Roosevelt and British Prime Minister Winston Churchill both loved the film, said historian Emily Yellin, and Roosevelt wanted prints rushed to theaters nationwide. The Voice of America radio network broadcast the minister's speech from the film, magazines reprinted it, and it was copied onto leaflets and dropped over German-occupied countries. Churchill sent Mayer a telegram claiming that ""Mrs. Miniver" is propaganda worth 100 battleships." Bosley Crowther (1960 biographer of Mayer, below), wrote in his "New York Times" review that "Mrs. Miniver" was the finest film yet made about the war,