How Green Was My Valley (film)
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How Green Was My Valley (film)
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This film has been preserved in the National Film Registry in 1990.
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How Green Was My Valley is a 1941 drama directed by John Ford. The film, based on the best-selling 1939 novel of the same name by Richard Llewellyn, was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and scripted by Philip Dunne. The film stars Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O'Hara, Anna Lee, Donald Crisp, and a very young Roddy McDowall. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, famously beating Citizen Kane, Sergeant York and The Maltese Falcon for Best Picture. It also won Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actor.
Why It Rocks
- For all its sentimental touched and melodramatic twists, this film called on viewers to question their fundamental beliefs about society.
- With the novel it’s based on having no structure, the crew had to try to make sense out of the story by arranging and transposing scenes. In the end, most of the plot was discarded, and narrated by Huw Morgan as he ages from 10 to 60. The time frame was limited to Huw as a 10-year-old, which not only eliminates potentially sticky scenes of Huw losing his virginity, it allowed the story to unfold from the plot of view of a young child not fully aware of the large political and social structures affecting his family. Plus, now Huw could participate in the choices and actions of adults without appreciating their consequences.
- Llewellyn's basic story remained intact as the film still documents how social changes bring about the dissolution of the Morgan family, coal miners in a Welsh village loosely based on Gilfach Goch.
- Details about labor unrest were pushed into the background, focusing on an affair between Gruffydd and Angharad Morgan, which was described as the "only halfway happy love story" in the film.
- Incredible performance from British child star Roddy McDowall as Huw Morgan, and Irish actress Maureen O’Hara as Angharad.
- Ford's own childhood echoed many of the incidents in How Green Was My Valley, one of the reasons why the film's emotions seem so heartfelt. Like the Joads in The Grapes of Wrath, the close-knit Morgans enjoy living and working surrounded by beauty, only to have it all taken away from them by forces out of their control. Ford doesn't offer any solutions to the problems, showcasing just how unfair and tough life was in those days. The downward arc of the film is as hopeless as in any other American film. Even the addition of a happy ending similar to Wuthering Heights did little to blunt Ford's message.
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