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.

As with many of George Bernard Shaw's plays, "Major Barbara" is essentially a political and social debate in dramatic form. At its heart is the conflict between the title character Barbara Undershaft, a Major in the Salvation Army, and her father Andrew Undershaft, a wealthy industrialist. (The family surname was derived from the church of St Andrew Undershaft in the city of London). Barbara is young and idealistic, deeply religious, a Christian socialist and a pacifist. Andrew is elderly, cynical, a freethinker in matters of religion, an apologist for capitalism and a man whose money has been made in the armaments industry. The crisis comes when the Salvation Army accepts a large donation from Andrew, much to Barbara's disgust as she despises her father and regards his money as morally tainted.Shaw's play was written in 1905, but the action of this film takes place at a more uncertain date. Some of the costumes would indeed suggest the late Victorian or Edwardian period, but the design of the motor cars, the Art Deco styling of Undershaft's factories and the Modernist accommodation provided for his workers all suggest that the story has been updated to the 1920s or 1930s. Although the film was shot in 1940, however, and premiered in 1941, the one decade in which we can be sure it is not set is the 1940s. There is no reference in the film to the war which was being waged at the time. Although Shaw always regarded himself as a socialist, he enjoyed a good argument as much as anyone, and he often gives a surprisingly generous hearing in his plays to capitalists and right-wingers, as he does to Andrew here. The film-makers clearly realised, however, that to start making points about the Nazi threat and about how Britain needed a strong arms industry to counter it would be to upset the balance of Shaw's play by loading the dice too much in Andrew's favour. So the action takes place in peacetime and no mention is made of any external threats to national security. (The scriptwriters also resisted the temptation to change the Christian name of Barbara's fiancé, Adolphus; audiences in 1941 must have been surprised to see the name "Adolf", even in Latinised form, given to a gentle, mild-mannered academic).Barbara regards the Salvation Army as hypocritical for accepting her father's money, but Shaw did not necessarily expect his audiences and readers to agree with her. Andrew's argument is that the charity doled out by the Salvation Army to the poor of London's East End is an inadequate answer to the problem of poverty; what the poor need is work, and as an employer he is in a position to provide it. Even Barbara, for all her moral scruples about the nature of her father's business, has to admit that he is an enlightened employer who looks after his workers' welfare and provides them with a steady income, even if he does so for self-interested motives. Andrew realises that a contented worker is a more productive worker, and one who is less likely to look for work elsewhere.Shaw's plays often involve the head more than the heart, and some of them work better on the printed page than they do on the stage. "Major Barbara", however, works well as a drama precisely because it involves a battle of the heart (represented by the intelligent but passionate Barbara) versus the head (represented by the cynically rationalistic Andrew and, to some extent, by Adolphus, an intellectual student of Greek literature). What makes the film work so well is that both main roles are so well played, the lovely Wendy Hiller (something of a specialist in Shavian drama) bringing out the full ardour of Barbara's crusading zeal and Robert Morley as Andrew putting up a robust defence of capital and of enlightened self-interest. They receive good support from Rex Harrison as Adolphus and Robert Newton as the Cockney thug Bill Walker who is later redeemed when he finds work at Andrew's factory; Newton was later to find fame playing another thuggish Cockney named Bill, Bill Sykes in David Lean's "Oliver Twist". (Not all the acting is as good; the Welsh-born Emlyn Williams shows us that it is not just Americans who find it difficult to put on a convincing Cockney accent).During his long lifetime, and in the years immediately following his death, Shaw enjoyed a very high reputation; he was sometimes even described as Britain's second-greatest playwright after Shakespeare. Today his place in the canon of English literature is perhaps rather less exalted than it was in 1941, and this may explain why this film is not particularly well-known nowadays. The themes of many of his plays, however, have remained relevant; "Major Barbara" is essentially a dramatisation of the perennial debate between idealism and pragmatism. With the exception of "My Fair Lady" (which owes most of its appeal to the music of Lerner and Loewe and to the charm of Audrey Hepburn) this must be my favourite Shavian film. It deserves to be remembered as a classic of the British cinema. 9/10

I'm surprised that this wonderful classic from the British cinema ever got made at the time it did. Not with having one of the major characters of the play being a munitions manufacturer. Not so very long ago munitions makers were a despised lot of people and in Major Barbara, Robert Morley's character of Edward Undershaft is admirable only for the realistic way he views life.People in his profession were characterized as 'merchants of death' and were held in low repute until they were needed when the United Kingdom was fighting for its survival again. Morley's Undershaft does not redeem the name of the profession.Major Barbara was first presented on the London stage in 1905 and waited 10 years before it made its Broadway debut in 1915. Europe had a general post Napoleonic peace for nearly 100 years and war was unthinkable. The arms merchants such as they were busily made their product and the countries armed more and more. But it was thought that the guns might be used in their various colonial endeavors. When they started getting used against each other in a World War, pacifism became very popular.But in Major Barbara its author George Bernard Shaw had a different idea in mind. I think his chief reason for writing the play was to illustrate one of Karl Marx's tenets that religion was the opiate of the masses. Shaw was a Fabian socialist and wanted to see socialism come to the United Kingdom by peaceful means. But he wouldn't have disagreed with that part of Marx's diagnosis about the ills of society. He lived until 1950 and saw the post war Labour government do much of what he advocated back in the day. One wonders what he would think now of British, indeed western society in general.Morley who has been estranged from his family for years returns and finds his eldest daughter Barbara played by Wendy Hiller a Salvation Army worker in the London slums. She thinks of herself as repudiating her hated father's evil works by doing good. He finds the idea of visiting her at the mission and showing her the error of her ways as he views it.Religion then as now needs money, why are the televangelists out there begging for your currency to keep their work afloat? The Salvation Army does do a limited amount of good with their soup kitchens and blandishments against indulging too much in the vices. But what Shaw and his fellow Socialists would argue is that without a real living wage and the workers having some say in production, all this does is just keep the workers at bay with dreams of a perfect life in the next world no matter how bad this world might be for them. Major Barbara is one of Shaw's greatest polemical work and in the characters of Undershaft and Barbara he pits the material against the spiritual and the material wins in a knockout. This production has some really good casting beginning with Hiller and Morley. Rex Harrison gets one of his early cinema roles as scholar Adolphus Cusins who Morley also bends to his point of view and uses the mutual attraction of Hiller and Harrison for each other for his own ends. Deborah Kerr makes her screen debut as an innocent new salvation army lass and Emlyn Williams and Robert Newton as a pair of working class types who work the system so to speak.Major Barbara is a play set firmly in its time, I doubt it could be updated, mainly because we've passed from the Industrial Age to the Information Age because of the computer. At least that's what the sociologists will tell you. New problems have arisen and for myself I don't think the organized labor movement has quite got a handle on them. Still this fine production raises questions that we should all think seriously about.

I just received the Eclipse Series collection which includes Major Barbara. I was familiar with a version of the movie that PBS (WNET-13 in New York) used to show. I was disappointed to see that scenes had been cut. Perhaps my favorite is after Undershaft negotiates his deal with cusins they talk about the True faith of an Armorer. What follows is a tour of Undershaft's ancestors. The DVD version I received cut this scene out. Does anyone know why or if there is an earlier version of the movie with that scene intact? Did anyone else pick that up?BARBARA. Is the bargain closed, Dolly? Does your soul belong to him now?(THE MOVIE NOW CUTS OUT HERE) CUSINS. No: the price is settled: that is all. The real tug of war is still to come. What about the moral question?LADY BRITOMART. There is no moral question in the matter at all, Adolphus. You must simply sell cannons and weapons to people whose cause is right and just, and refuse them to foreigners and criminals.UNDERSHAFT No: none of that. You must keep the true faith of an Armorer, or you don't come in here.CUSINS. What on earth is the true faith of an Armorer?UNDERSHAFT. To give arms to all men who offer an honest price for them, without respect of persons or principles: to aristocrat and republican, to Nihilist and Tsar, to Capitalist and Socialist, to Protestant and Catholic, to burglar and policeman, to black man white man and yellow man, to all sorts and conditions, all nationalities, all faiths, all follies, all causes and all crimes. The first Undershaft wrote up in his shop IF GOD GAVE THE HAND, LET NOT MAN WITHHOLD THE SWORD. The second wrote up ALL HAVE THE RIGHT TO FIGHT: NONE HAVE THE RIGHT TO JUDGE. The third wrote up TO MAN THE WEAPON: TO HEAVEN THE VICTORY. The fourth had no literary turn; so he did not write up anything; but he sold cannons to Napoleon under the nose of George the Third. The fifth wrote up PEACE SHALL NOT PREVAIL SAVE WITH A SWORD IN HER HAND. The sixth, my master, was the best of all. He wrote up NOTHING IS EVER DONE IN THIS WORLD UNTIL MEN ARE PREPARED TO KILL ONE ANOTHER IF IT IS NOT DONE. After that, there was nothing left for the seventh to say. So he wrote up, simply, UNASHAMED.CUSINS. My good Machiavelli, I shall certainly write something up on the wall; only, as I shall write it in Greek, you won't be able to read it. But as to your Armorer's faith, if I take my neck out of the noose of my own morality I am not going to put it into the noose of yours. I shall sell cannons to whom I please and refuse them to whom I please. So there!UNDERSHAFT. From the moment when you become Andrew Undershaft, you will never do as you please again. Don't come here lusting for power, young man.