How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Very well executed

Excellent but underrated film

The film makes a home in your brain and the only cure is to see it again.

It's the kind of movie you'll want to see a second time with someone who hasn't seen it yet, to remember what it was like to watch it for the first time.

From the opening scenes this film embraces you. By the end, there are scenes so heart-wrenching, they take your breath away. I have seen it many times - on television and on DVD - never on the movie screen though, where I can only imagine the overwhelming experience it must have been.The story of a Welsh coal mining family at the end of the 1890's going through a time of great change was adapted from Richard Llewellyn's novel. However the film became more than an adaption, it took on a life of its own. The novel was accused of casting too sentimental a light on the life of Welsh miners, but the movie definitely did - unashamedly.Anyway, there were passages in the book that could never have reached the screen in 1941 including the punishment handed out to a child molester and Huw's first sexual encounter. But whatever its departure from reality, the movie probably influenced the way people thought of the Welsh for decades to come; showing what a powerful work this film was and is.Director John Ford was always sensitive to the breakdown of family. His background was Irish-American and you can see Irish characteristics transposed to that Welsh village. The cast included some very Irish actors: Maureen O'Hara and Barry Fitzgerald. However O'Hara was simply stunning - it's hard to imagine anyone else, no matter how authentically Welsh in the role. There is a touch of movie magic about this film, and it's best not to be too pedantic about details in "How Green Was My Valley". But no great film is one person. So many talents made this movie. Alfred Newman's score is almost another star. Newman could wring emotion from any scene but he went to town on this movie with strings, choir and Welsh hymns.Truly inspired art direction and photography gave the film a look - how brilliant is that village snaking up the hillside, which eventually becomes the slag heap? Even the interference of Darryl Zanuck, especially with the editing, made a significant contribution.And the cast: Roddy McDowall, Walter Pidgeon, Sara Allgood, Donald Crisp and others - all of them gone now, yet all united forever in this haunting movie, in much the way that the cast comes back at the end.But the driving force was Ford. His mastery shows in crowd scenes, in intimate moments where each character is brought alive as an individual and especially in the way so much is told visually.Separating the film even more from the book is the recent discovery that Richard Llewellyn did not live the life described in the novel, he was an Englishman. He made the whole thing up from tales he was told and his imagination. But to my way of thinking, that he was able to write something so convincing and enduring, which also became an extraordinary motion picture, is nothing short of genius.

John Ford's How Green Was my Valley is a depressing story told in excellence about a Welsh father named Gwilym, (played by Donald Crisp in an Oscar winning performance) whose oldest sons are coal miners and wants his youngest son to find a decent job and then decides to be a coal miner like his brothers. The movie stars Walter Pidgeon as a preacher who thinks about whether he can be in love with Gwilym's oldest daughter Angharad (played by Maureen O'Hara) who is very much in love with but Pidgeon's character however doesn't believe that he can give her the life she deserves even after she comes back from New Zealand without her husband. Ford's movie also teaches us the times of hardship that Gwilym and his sons went through while working in the mine. Now that I'm reviewing the film that made John ford win his 3rd directing Oscar, as well as Clint Eastwood's favorite movie to me the film was very good being one of 1941's best and greatest achievements in film of that year and in film history.

At the turn of the century in a Welsh mining village, the Morgans (he stern, she gentle) raise coal-mining sons and hope their youngest will find a better life.William Wyler, the original director, saw the screen test of McDowall and chose him for the part. Wyler was then replaced by John Ford, who thankfully kept McDowall. Fox wanted to shoot the movie in Wales in Technicolor, but events in Europe during World War II made this impossible. Instead, Ford built a replica of the mining town at the nearly 3,000-acre Fox Ranch in Malibu Canyon. Can you tell the difference? Of course, the cast had only one Welsh actor: Rhys Williams, and he was only in a minor role.At the Academy Awards, the film won Best Picture, Best Director (John Ford), Best Actor (Donald Crisp) and Best Cinematography. Today we complain that the Best Picture did not go to "Citizen Kane". For me, the bigger insult is the Cinematography award. Gregg Toland is among the best who ever lived.

I have not read the book for about 40 years so when I saw the DVD on special offer I thought I was doing well. However... it's obvious, as previously noted, that not only had the person directing the film never spoken to a Welsh person, they did not know anything about Wales. The small mining town in the valley looked like a little house on the prairie and the meagre miners' cottage was vast inside, making a mockery of the poverty issues so strongly fought against. The accents were dire, they really were, but what finished it for me (no, I am ashamed to say that I did not last the duration of the movie), was the appearance of two dear little birds on the windowsill by Huw's sick bed. Nothing like those ever flew in the UK when I lived there. I kept wishing that it could be remade today. I wonder if it could? The likes of Ruth Jones for example, could show the real Wales . Ah well, i suppose we put it down to time passing.