How Green Was My Valley
Directed by John Ford
Written by Philip Dunne based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn
1941/USA
Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation
Repeat viewing/Netflix rental
#155 of 1001 Movies You Must See Before You Die
[box] Huw Morgan: [narrating] Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still, real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my valley then.[/box]
This is the film that famously trounced Citizen Kane at the 1942 Oscar ceremony. There is no denying its beauty.
Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowall) looks back through the eyes of age at his childhood home in a Welsh coal-mining village and how a traditional way of life gradually fell apart. Gwyilm Morgan (Donald Crisp) and his wife (Sara Allgood) have a brood of six children – five boys and daughter Angharad (Maureen O’Hara). Huw is much the youngest. Gwylim and all the older boys work in the coal mine. As the story begins, the eldest son weds Bronwyn (Anna Lee) and Huw becomes devoted to her.
Angharad loves the local preacher Mr. Gruffyd (Walter Pidgeon) from afar. Her great beauty attracts the son of the local mine owner. In desperation, she reveals her love to the minister, who obviously loves her too, but inexplicably he rejects her and she is doomed to a loveless marriage.
Meanwhile, the coal economy strains the family to the breaking point. The sons become union men in defiance of their father and move out. Then they are gradually forced to emigrate by diminishing wages and firings. Huw eventually goes to work in the mine at a heartbreakingly young age. Mine disasters plague the village. But despite everything, humor and love ties everything and everyone together in the end. With Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields.
This is a spectacular looking film. The landscapes and textures are brilliantly composed and shot. Most of the acting is first-rate and Roddy McDowell gives one of the best performances ever by a child actor. The thing that mars the movie for me is the discordant presence of the pedantic and boring Walter Pidgeon at its center. His character is self-righteous in the extreme and rubs me the wrong way throughout. It’s a shame because I know he is meant to be sympathetic.
How Green Was My Valley won Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor (Donald Crisp), Best Black-and-White Cinematography (Arthur C. Miller), and Best Black-and-White Art Direction. It was nominated for Best Supporting Actress (Sara Allgood), Best Screenplay, Best Sound Recording, Best Film Editing and Best Scoring of a Dramatic Picture (Alfred Newman).
Trailer
Yes, technically it is nice enough, but not enough to beat Citizen Kane. There is however in the film a message that is totally ludicrous. How it is possible to make a notalgic, loving film about an ancestral home and at the same time tear it completely apart? Yeah, we all long for those happy day where we died in the mines or from ruined longs while the mines themselves destroyed everything that was pretty in the homeland. Just makes no sense at all unless you are a masochist or an idiot.
It is a real downer, isn’t it? I took the nostalgia to be for the time at the very beginning of the movie when all the family was together and working for a decent wage at the mine. You are right that the movie is basically about how it all fell apart.
What a film……it elicits all types of emotions. Being from coal mining country, the disasters that take the lives of the miners is not unknown to me and men coughing up their lungs to black lung is terrible to see. So it was not all nostalgia and home sweet home as depicted in this film But I cried when Donal Crisp was killed.
It’s so good to see you back, Jill! Yes, I rather like How Green Was My Valley. Not every film needs to be all sweetness and light. I thought Donald Crisp was great and Roddy MacDowell was perfect, a real young boy and not cute or artificial.