After last week’s Reviews By Request poll resulted in a tie, I decided to watch and write up the first of the two “requested” films, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley, in advance of this weekend’s Oscar ceremony. My review of the second film, Tom Jones, will run two weeks from today.
Among many film lovers, John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley has gotten something of a bad rap as the movie that bested Citizen Kane for the 1941 Best Picture Oscar. And while Valley isn’t the film Kane is, we might say the same of nearly any other film ever made, which makes the comparison a little unfair. Moreover, it makes perfect sense that the Hollywood establishment would prefer the elegiac Valley to the scathing Kane, especially when you consider that both films were made during World War II, when national and pro-Allied sentiment were at their peak. But today, these concerns are incidental, and the most important thing is this- How Green Was My Valley is still a pretty terrific film.
How Green With My Valley, based on a best-selling novel by Richard Lewellyn, tells the story of the Morgans, a Welsh family living in a mining community around the turn of the century. The Morgans aren’t rich, but they seem to be pretty blessed- patriarch Gwyllim (Oscar-winner Donald Crisp) works in the coal mine alongside his five eldest sons, mother Beth (Sara Allgood) cares for the house with their only daughter Angharad (Maureen O’Hara), and the youngest boy Huw (Roddy McDowall) is bright and full of potential.
However, the family’s troubles begin soon enough. The closing of mines in neighboring valleys lead to a surplus of workers in the area, leading to lower wages and job loss. Two of the sons leave home to seek work overseas, later followed by two others. Angharad, despite her feelings for the local preacher Gryffudd (Walter Pidgeon), marries the son of the mine’s owner, a marriage that takes her overseas as well. And the mine claims both the family’s eldest son Ivor and, eventually, Gwyllim.
But although How Green Was My Valley is undeniably a story filled with loss, it’s anything but a slog. That’s because Ford, Lewellyn, and screenwriter Philip Dunne infuse the film with a warm nostalgia for the long-gone world of the film. The story is narrated by the now-grown Huw, and he remembers his childhood with fondness, and even when things didn’t go so well, he learned from his experiences and survived to tell the tale. Heck, look at the title. Not only does it emphasize the “was,” thereby implying that it’s no longer so green, but it’s also “my valley”, implying that it’s the valley of Huw’s memories.
Consequently, the storytelling is characterized by broad narrative strokes rather than minute detail. The circumstances of a miners’ strike are sketchy, as they would have been to a young boy (this is a far cry from the grimness of Ford’s last film The Grapes of Wrath). Huw’s memories of the strike consist mostly of talk of unionization, and the gloom that settles over the town during the months when the men aren’t work. Most of the film is like this, with adults’ affairs observed as if from a distance, although Huw’s own experiences seem more vivid. The only (small) objection I have to the film’s storytelling is that it occasionally brings out Ford’s somewhat awkward sense of low comedy. I for one could have done without the antics of a pair of drunken brawlers who are tasked to teach young Huw how to fight.
But such objections are small compared with achievements of How Green Was My Valley. Supposedly, the film was originally intended to be a massive Technicolor extravaganza in the vein of Gone With the Wind, but when the war began Fox had to move shooting from Wales to California, trim the running time in half, and shoot in black and white. I can’t say for sure, but I think the film benefited from this smaller scale- the travails of the Morgans probably couldn’t withstand the epic treatment. And while shooting in black and white was a practical decision that allowed the hills of California to convincingly double as the Welsh countryside, it also enhances the 
nostalgic vibe given off by the film in a way that the flashier Technicolor couldn’t have managed.
And if nothing else, it’s that nostalgia that makes How Green Was My Valley work even today. The chief pleasures of the film don’t come from the story but rather from the portrayal of the community itself, a community that, if it didn’t already belong to the past when the film was made, surely does now. Perhaps most important are the old Welsh songs that fill the soundtrack. Ivor is the leader of a chorus in town (he gets invited to perform for the Queen), but even the miners sing hearty tunes as they come down the hill after a long day’s work. “Singing is in my people as sight is in the eye,” observes the adult Huw, and this music extends even to the spoken dialogue. When Angharad gets engaged, Gryffudd’s heart is broken, but he buries his own feelings in the interest of her future. As he tells her, “I think I would start to kill if I saw the white come to your hair twenty years before its time.” Who talks like this anymore, if in fact anyone ever did? Exactly.
