How Green Was My Valley (1941) - film review

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...

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

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?