|
|
|
How Green Was My Valley
1941 Drama
| |
Credits
-
Director: John Ford
-
Script: Philip Dunne, Richard Llewellyn (novel)
-
Photo: Arthur C. Miller
-
Music: Alfred Newman
-
Cast: Walter Pidgeon (Mr. Gruffydd),
Maureen O'Hara (Angharad Morgan),
Anna Lee (Bronwyn),
Donald Crisp (Mr Morgan),
Sara Allgood (Mrs Morgan),
Roddy McDowall (Huw),
John Loder (Ianto),
Barry Fitzgerald (Cyfartha),
Patric Knowles (Ivor),
Morton Lowry (Mr Jonas),
Arthur Shields (Mr Parry),
Ann E. Todd (Ceinwen),
Frederick Worlock (Dr Richards),
Richard Fraser (Davy),
Evan S. Evans (Gwilym),
James Monks (Owen),
Rhys Williams (Dai Bando),
Lionel Pape (Evans),
Marten Lamont (Iestyn Evans)
-
Country: USA
-
Language: English / Welsh
-
Runtime: 118 min; B&W
|
|
|
|
| |
Summary
As he prepares to leave the house he has lived in for fifty years, Huw
Morgan looks back on the eventful years of his childhood. In the
1890s, Huw grew up in a small Welsh mining town in the Rhondda Valley, the
youngest of six children of the stern but kind-hearted Gwilym
Morgan. Aged 12, Huw is a bright lad and a promising student, but
he intends to follow in the steps of his father and brothers who work
at the local colliery. The peace of the family and the town is
shattered when the miners call a strike in response to the pit owner’s
attempt to lower their wages. Mr Morgan opposes the strike, but
his sons are for it. And so the family begins to fall apart...
Review
When it was published in 1939, Richard Llewellyn’s
semi-autobiographical novel How
Green Was My Valley was an immediate international best seller
and quickly earned its reputation as one of the best-loved British
novels of the Twentieth Century. The novel’s success drew the
attention of Hollywood producer Darryl F. Zanuck, who intended to give
it the full Gone with the Wind
treatment - a four-hour long epic, shot in Technicolor and filmed on
location in South Wales. The outbreak of World War II
somewhat scuppered these plans, but Zanuck still went ahead, albeit
with a less ambitious vision.
John Ford was chosen to direct the film, mainly on the strength of his
outstanding work on another notable literary adaptation,
The Grapes of Wrath (1940). A
replica Welsh mining town, especially constructed in Malibu Canyon,
California, made a convincing alternative to the real thing. The
only let down is the laughably diverse range of accents amongst the
cast - only two or three of the actors manage to give a fair semblance
of a Welsh accent.
The story is a powerful one, a series of intense personal dramas which
chart the slow disintegration of a harmonious family unit, the result of
changing social and economic circumstances. The break-up of the
family runs alongside the spoiling of the countryside around them - the
lush green fields gradually disappearing beneath a mountain of black,
poisonous slag. Having the story told from the perspective of a
young boy strengthens its impact and poignancy considerably. What
the audience experiences, through the eyes of young Huw Morgan, is
something akin to the Fall of Man. The story begins in paradise,
a lush Eden where there is immense social cohesion and everyone is
content with his place in the scheme of things. And it ends in a world
marred by greed, ambition and individualism, where the bond between
parents and their offspring is irreparably weakened.
Although, like many of John Ford’s films, How Green Was My Valley fails to
have the impact it had when it was first released, it is still a
remarkable piece of cinema, with an extraordinary power to move its
spectator. As in The Grapes of
Wrath, Ford cranks up the emotional lever just as far as he can,
imbuing every one of the personal dramas in the film with an immense
sense of poignancy. We experience Huw’s burst of elation
when springtime comes after his miserable bedridden winter. We
feel the anguish of his mother when, one by one, her babies are taken
from her. And we share the anger felt by Huw’s brothers in
reaction to the exploitative practices of their employers. It is
a film which digs deeply into our emotional crevices, but with great
subtlety, evoking a genuine empathy between subject and spectator.
The film may be in black-and-white, but it is shot with such
artistic sensibility
that we do get an impression of the lyrical beauty of the Welsh setting
which Richard Llewellyn describes so evocatively in his novel.
There’s even a strange beauty to the coalmine interiors - not the
grimly claustrophobic lairs described by Zola but a child’s fantasy
world of diffuse light and magical caverns (just as young Huw might
remember them).
In the cast, Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood stand out for their
sympathetic portrayals of Mr and Mrs Morgan. In his first
major film role, a young Roddy McDowall makes a very engaging 12-year
old Huw Morgan, his performance carried mainly by the expressive dark
eyes that would later serve him so well in the Planet of the Apes phase of his
career. Although it would be churlish to fault the contributions
of Walter Pidgeon and Maureen O'Hara, they do look a bit too much like
two glamorous Hollywood actors who have been parachuted in to help the
film sell.
When How Green Was My Valley
was released in 1941 it was both a commercial and critical
success. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards in 1942 -
of which it won five - Best Picture (beating Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon), Best
Director, Best Cinematography (B&W), Best Art Direction (B&W)
and Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Donald Crisp). Today, the film
is widely regarded as one of John Ford’s masterpieces and a worthy
adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s celebrated novel.
© James Travers 2008
For World Cinema on DVD...
|
|
|
|
|
