How Green Was My Valley
Tonight on Classic Cinema we’re looking at the second in an eight-film series of movies directed by John Ford. This week our film is How Green Was My Valley, a highly-honoured picture that remains a favourite. When it was released in 1941 it won six Academy Awards (including for best picture, best direction and best screenplay) and was nominated for five others. It has kind of gone down in history as the movie that beat out Citizen Kane in all those categories. That might have been an injustice, but if Citizen Kane was undervalued, at least the movie the Academy preferred was also a very fine one. Over a three-year period, Ford had now directed three highly-acclaimed films: Stagecoach, The Grapes of Wrath, and now How Green Was My Valley. His latest Oscar for Best Direction (in addition to all his other critical awards) brought him to the very apex of his career. At this moment, on the verge of America’s entry into World War II, Ford was undoubtedly the most eminent filmmaker in Hollywood.
How Green Was My Valley is based on a novel by David Llewellyn which had been a best-seller a couple of years earlier. It tells the story of a family in a Welsh coal-mining village around the turn of the century—told from the viewpoint of a middle-aged man finally leaving the valley, and reminiscing vividly about his childhood environment and experiences. The movie is a classic story of this kind, an evocation of a bygone golden age when families and communities seemed closer and more solid and where everything seemed to glow intensely with life and meaning. Little Huw Morgan has a gravely patriarchal father and five strapping big brothers—all of them working down the pit—a beautiful twenty-something sister and a strong and loving mother who is a powerful binding force in the family.
The structure of this family, and indeed of the whole world in which it exists, has the idealized quality of a perfect institution where all the parts reinforce each other, and where the values of stability and dependability are firmly entrenched in rituals and the assignments of place. Each member of the family has a well-understood role and set of responsibilities, duties and privileges—again, structure is so important as a reassuring and strengthening quality. The daily and weekly rituals of work and washing-up and mealtimes and paydays and all the rest, and the local traditions of choral singing and weddings and chapel-going, are depicted with a loving certainty of touch that regards all these things as fundamental and natural.
Actually, the story is a catalogue of loss. As the family members move away into exile or marriage, death and separation and history itself are acting to disperse the family and the community; and of course Huw must also grow up and leave his childhood (although it’s significant that the movie stops short of showing us this final loss). But the emphasis in the film is not on that loss, but rather on the warmth and solidity of what was there.
Here Ford really comes into his own, and we can see repeatedly and in detail how his cinematic approach can build up such a solid edifice. The whole movie was shot in the Twentieth-Century Fox studios and back lot, and for once this controlled and often artificial-seeming environment seems exactly right for the project. The surrounding Welsh hills are rich with vegetation, the cobbled main street with its packed row-houses slopes steeply up to the pit-head, and above all the interiors are warm and cozy without ever seeming cramped even when full of people. In the Morgan’s house the ceilings are low, and—unusually for the period—they’re visible in the shot. Those low ceilings produce not claustrophobia but a sense of shelter and enclosure, a feeling that’s emphasized by the light streaming through the windows into this protective burrow. Ford’s strong compositional sense is constantly arranging all the locations, interior and exterior, into balanced and harmonious pictures, and those beautifully ordered compositions also convey the message of a balanced and harmonious world. Then we can also see another of Ford’s strongest visual characteristics, the low angle shot, which subtly elevates these ordinary working folk into a kind of heroic plane. These visual qualities are not at all obtrusive—most often you have to look for them to see them—but they do exemplify Ford’s essentially poetic and idealising view of the world.
The characters are all a little bit larger than life. Not only the heroes, but also villainous figures such as the sneering church deacon or the sadistic schoolmaster, are painted in broad, Dickensian strokes. For the most part, the performances are really first-rate. The crucially important part of little Huw—which could have derailed the movie if taken too cutely or sentimentally—is just beautifully accomplished by young Roddy McDowall at the very outset of his distinguished acting career. Donald Crisp deservedly won an Oscar for his performance as the father Gwilym, and Sara Allgood was equally deserving as the mother Beth. Maureen O’Hara as big sister Angharad shows why some commentators have considered her the ultimate Ford heroine—a big, healthy girl with nothing weak or drooping about her. Canadian expatriate Walter Pidgeon, approaching the height of his career, is authoritative in the important role of the local minister Gruffydd. And many of the smaller roles are memorably taken as well. Altogether, I think this movie can be just as effective today as it was in 1941.
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I said on an earlier program that John Ford’s idealism make him a hard sell nowadays—and I speak from experience after having encountered many students who were simply unable to respond to what they perceived as his sentimentality and a certain unsympathetic brand of social conservatism. In a sense, Ford’s films represent exactly the American social ideology against which young people in the 1960s rebelled, a rhetoric of home and family, community and nation, ritual and tradition. Those qualities form one central set of values in American culture, but they’re challenged, and in recent decades defeated, by the countervailing values of freedom and individuality, rebellion and nonconformity, constant self-invention and self-realization. How Green Was My Valley offers what I would call a compelling picture of that first set of values. Ford’s idealized figures are not particularly beautiful or at all glamorous; they are sometimes prickly or even abrasive; you get to see them warts and all. And it’s this imperfection or humanness that renders them powerful, that transforms them from implausibly perfect figures into something recognizable. So for example Gwilym Morgan is caught soaking his feet of a Sunday and has to receive the mine-owner in bare feet and rolled-up trousers, and the film has some comic sport at the spectacle of his wife Beth’s ignorance during the school lessons. But this kind of thing doesn’t tarnish the image of these splendid folk at all—just the reverse in fact.
I said before the film that this story is a catalogue of loss, and I want to come back to this idea for a minute. Really, if you summararize the film, you discover that it’s one bad thing after another happening. The discord between father and sons over the union leads to the sons leaving home. The recently-married and expectant father Ivor is killed in the mine and his lovely wife left a lonely widow without a function in the community. The conditions in the industry undercut wages and drive first the younger two and then the older two sons overseas. The minister Gruffydd’s highminded principles produce his own sorrow and Angharad’s horribly cold marriage and exile. Gruffydd is forced out of the parish by evil gossips. The last event in the movie is the death of the father, embraced by his desperately loving youngest child. And beyond the story, the Welsh valley itself is in the process of becoming first a giant slag-heap and then, as we’ve seen in recent years, a sad spectacle of social and economic trauma following the death of the coal-mining industry in Britain.
In addition to all this, a lot of the social structure seems far from ideal. A patriarchal rule of law which sees grown children needing to ask permission to speak at the dinner table and being driven from the home over a difference of opinion; a ministry which seems to be tolerant and loving but is powerless to prevent the excommunication of an unwed mother; a propertied-class peopled with toffee-nosed ignoramuses and snobs; a school system infested with sadistic creeps—the more you look at this society carefully the more cracks you start to see. And of course all this is in the movie, even if it’s not right up front.
Defeat, dissolution, death—that’s the story of the film. It’s only the viewpoint that transforms it into a glowing ideal, a perfect world. The viewpoint is of course the narrator’s—exemplified even inside the story by young Huw’s decision to go down the mine rather than off to university—and it’s also the filmmaker’s. Here we have our first example of the peculiar, characteristic nature of Ford’s idealism. It’s always, or almost always, an idealization in defeat, a looking back to an ideal past or—as we’ll see in some of Ford’s Westerns—looking forward to an ideal future. It’s not now, in the present; it’s not lasting. It’s an ideal that must always somehow be out of our grasp in one way or another. The nobility of Ford’s characters, and also the nobility of his style, arises exactly from this sense of the impossibility of the dream, or at least its unrealizableness in the present. That’s the ache of longing that underlies all of Ford’s boisterousness and good fellowship. In his best work—which we’ve seen some of just now and which we’ll be seeing a lot more of in coming weeks—that sense of distance and fervent hope is amongst the most deep and moving things that American cinema has to offer.