Film 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
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Next John Ford film:
My Darling Clementine (1946)