Roddy MacDowell in How Green Was My Valley, 1941.
We continue our survey of the Twenty Greatest Movies of each decade with the Twenty Greatest Movies of the 1940′s
Part Two, 1930 – ’33.
Part Three: 1934 – ’37.
Part Five: His Girl Friday, 1940
Part Six: Remember the Night, 1940.
Part Seven: My Favorite Wife, 1940.
Part Eight: Waterloo Bridge, 1940.
Part Nine, The Lady Eve, 1941.
Child actor Roddy MacDowell, center, with director John Ford, in two-toned shoes, and screenwriter Philip Dunne.
How Green Was My Valley, 1941. I know I’m supposed to favor John Ford’s westerns above all his other work, but in spite of my love of westerns, and in spite of my love of John Wayne, I favor How Green Was My Valley as Ford’s greatest achievement.
Set in a Welsh mining town at the turn of the century, this masterpiece tells the story of the Morgan family—mother, father, six brothers and one sister—and a way of life, disintegrating under the forces of modernity.
Told in flashback, the adult Huw (pronounced Hugh) looks back fifty years later on his childhood. The voice-over is sad, elegiac, evoking a vanished way of life.
Roddy MacDowell is Huw and the film is presented almost entirely from his child’s point of view. It’s a powerful device that lets us see his world from a limited, but deeply focused vantage point. The language of the film, narration and dialogue, are Shakespearian without being precious:
Everything I ever learnt as a small boy came from my father, and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday. In those days, the black slag—the waste of the coalpits—had only begun to cover the side of our hill, not yet enough to mar the countryside nor blacken the beauty of our village. For the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green. I can hear, even now, the voice of my sister Angharad.
Narration is one of the most difficult devices in the screenwriter’s arsenal. Often slowing the story to a crawl, the best choice for the screenwriter is to use narration as a way of setting the film’s tone and the means by which an extra layer of story is constructed. Well crafted narration adds depth, complexity and unexpected information to the image.
The story is episodic, but the narrative is smooth, held together by Huw’s lovely voice-over and the repeated emphasis on the everyday rituals in Huw’s tightly knit family. Family meals, formal and proper, are preceded by a prayer. Everyone eats in silence. In the parlor following dinner, a box is placed on a table before Mr. Morgan, beautifully played by the great Donald Crisp. The entire family gathers around, coins are handed to each of the children in order of their age. The youngest boy Huw is the last in line to receive a coin:
Huw’s narration adds dimension to the scene:
After dinner, when dishes had been washed, the box was brought to the table, for the spending money to be handed out. No one in our Valley had ever seen a bank. We kept our savings on the mantelpiece. My father used to say that money was made to be spent, just as men spend their strength and brains in earning it—and as willingly—but always with a purpose.
With a wide-eyed gaze Huw witnesses all the significant events that befall his family and village. There are wage cuts, unions organize, there are strikes, mine accidents, family struggles and the tragic, unrequited love affair between the local preacher, Walter Pidgeon, and Huw’s only sister, the stunning 19 year-old Irish actress Maureen O’Hara.
Maureen O’Hara and Walter Pidgeon suffer a tragic love affair in How Green Was My Valley.
One of the most moving scenes shows Huw meeting Bronwyn, Anna Lee, his brother Ivor’s fiancee. She carries a basket on her hip and there’s a charming bonnet perched on her head. Huw is speechless in the face of this glowing country beauty:
It was on this afternoon that I first saw Bron—Bronwyn. She had come over from the next valley for her first call on my father and mother. I think I fell in love with Bronwyn then. Perhaps it is foolish to think a child could fall in love. But I am the child that was, and nobody knows how I felt, except only me.
Anna Lee would emerge as one of the most prominent women of Ford’s stock company. She was forgiving of Ford’s crusty personality and Ford’s warm feelings for Lee were magnified when she collapsed during a particularly heart wrenching scene and suffered a miscarriage. Lee had not told her director that she was pregnant. Nevertheless, Ford felt guilty over the tragedy. In the following years, at the start of every John Ford picture in which Lee appeared, Ford would line up cast and crew and ask Lee if she was pregnant.
“No sir,”she replied.
“I just wanted to make sure.”
How Green Was My Valley has all the elements of tragedy: hopeless love affairs, senseless death, poverty, cruel gossip, and the fracturing of family. But the fine script by Philip Dunne—after several false starts with other writers who emphasized the politics of the striking miners—based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn, manages to evoke hope and glory in a vision of a life that is no more but stands as an ideal to which we can all aspire.
Though John Ford was not responsible for developing the script—he replaced director William Wyler—Ford understood that the spine of the story was family and community as opposed to the collective which earlier drafts emphasized.
It was studio head Darryl F. Zanuck, a former screenwriter and the only early Hollywood mogul who was not Jewish, who understood the material, developed the script, and in the face of furious opposition from his N.Y. board of directors, insisted on making the film, even threatening to take the package to another studio. In fact, the final polish on the script was almost certainly written by Zanuck.
A story of dispersal and loss, unhappy marriages, family conflicts and death in the blackness of the coa
l mines, Ford managed to craft a movie that glows with the aura of warm nostalgia as seen through the eyes of an awestruck child, without ever betraying the dark tone of the material.
In the end Huw reflects on memories which have been transformed into sacred images.
Men like my father cannot die. They are with me still—real in memory as they were in flesh, loving and beloved forever. How green was my Valley then.
Let’s look at a brief clip in which villagers sing, evoking a world of unstated emotion:
How Green Was My Valley was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning five, and beating out such classics as Citizen Kane, The Maltese Falcon, Suspicion and Sergeant York for Best Picture. Sometimes the Academy actually gets it right.
Produced by Fox, the studio wanted to shoot the movie on location in Wales, but war in Europe made this impossible. Instead, the studio built a replica of a Welsh mining town at the 3,000-acre Fox Ranch in Malibu Canyon.
Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.
15 Comments
Yes, a classic and arguably (but not too arguably) the finest work on celluloid; even better than the great Quiet Man, which comes in at a close second in my mind. a true masterpiece that’s easy to watch over and over again!
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Barry:
UA sort of counts as a case of talent trtying to out-mogul the moguls. But UA was always dysfucntional and never operated as a real studio. Chaplin and Griffith viewed it as a means by which they could achieve artistic freedom. Thus they ignored the studio aspects of the structure and concentrated exclusively on their own work. Only Mary Pickford, a real business woman, tried to build UA into a Hollywood studio, but she could never quite make it work. The latest talent to try and make UA work is Tom Cruise and he too has failed.
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Robert, been thinking about your response relative to moguls and the building of studios. UA counts. Chaplin, Fairbanks, Pickford…Yes?
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David:
I have not heard of The Master Switch, but it sounds likje my kind of book and I will order it ASAP. Thanks so much for the tip.
Let me know how you like HGWMV.
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Bill:
I’m glad I can make you and others aware of some great films that might have escaped your radar, or movies that deserve a second look.
Have not seen The King’s Speech. I’m always a few months behind the latest films.
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Ordered it from Netflix.
A book you might enjoy, Robert, is “The Master Switch” by Tim Wu…has a lot on early movie-industry history, as well as radio/TV broadcasting, telephone industry, and Internet. His main theme is the cyclical shifts of control between entrepreneurs and those who would entrench their competitive position via government action.
He says the early movie industry in the US was controlled by a patent cartel established by Edison…this cartel insisted that films be no more than 15-30 minutes long, this restriction and the control of the cartel being broken only by the mostly-Jewish entrepreneurs who entered the industry from outside.
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Robert – you have helped to give me an appreciation of movies because of your insight and explaining the technical aspects – why they work or don’t work.
So here’s another to go on my list!
BTW I think The King’s Speech is one of the best movies I have seen in years – have you seen it?
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Heather:
HGWMV is one of my all time favorite movies. Angharad—much loved one—is just a lovely name. It’s Hebrew equivalent is Ahuva.
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I’m so glad you chose this film, it is one of my most favorite. I even gave my baby daughter Angharad as a middle name.
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Barry:
Indeed, it is Irving Pichel’s resonant voice that we hear in the voice-over and his work should be acknowledged. Thanks so much.
I define early Hollywood Jewish moguls as the men who invented the movie business as a business and built studio and distribution empires: L.B. Mayer, the Cohen Bros., the Warner Bros., Marcus Loew, William Fox, Irving Thalberg, Adolf Zukor, and Carl Laemmle.
Griffith, Fairbanks, Chaplin and Pickford were “talent” who built, or tried to build personal studios, but never quite achieved, well, moguldom.
Herbert Yates is an interesting figure. Yes, he did found Republic Pictures, but he was never a real mogul, he was too cheap and lacked real vision.
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Johnny:
I love The Quiet Man, but prefer the epic poetry and multistory line of HGWMV.
Zanuck planned on shooting HGWMV in Technicolor in Wales, but the war ended that plan. I’m glad, I believe the subject matter is best mediated through black and white photography.
But yeah, Maureen O’Hara’s red hair is a wonder to behold.
Ford was far from warm and fuzzy. Usually, he was a first class bastard. There were actors who, once they worked with him, hated him, and passed on any further Ford films.
Henry Fonda and Ford collaborated on several very fine films, but on Mr. Roberts, Fonda expressed dismay at aspects of Ford’s direction. Ford punched Fonda in the face. And that was the end of that relationship.
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Robert–Irving Pichel voiced the narration, and unbilled though he was, credit should still be given. Oh, don’t DeMille, Griffith and the axis headed by Douglas Fairbanks, the original, and Mary Pickford count as moguls…? And perhaps in a quite different way, Herb Yates…? No…Yes…?
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Christoper:
Glad you’re enjoying the series. Let me know how you like HGWMV.
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Robert, like you I would favor a non-western as my Ford favorite but it would be The Quiet Man. If you are going to make a movie with Maureen O’Hara, it best to see her hair in living color. It’d be like making The Red Shoes in B&W and not being able to see that the shoes really are red (remember Lermontov examining shoes a different shade of red) or the glory of Moira Shearer’s hair.
That said, HGIMV is a powerful and emotional film and it would have been a shame had it lost to Kane. Then again Goldie Hawn has won more Oscars than Cary Grant, Barbara Stanwyck or Alfred Hitchcock so it’s hard to argue the AAs are a perfect measure of quality.
Has any director ever had a stock company the quality of Ford’s? Ford was not a warm and fuzzy director so it’s a good thing that Bond, Wayne, McLagen and the rest knew that what he was putting on the screen was well worth it and kept coming back for more.
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Oh, my, Robert – that clip made me cry, and I don’t even know what the context is. I suppose this is the sort of scene people have in mind when they say “they don’t make them like that anymore.”
And it’s fascinating to me to see Donald Crisp, since I’ve never seen him in anything except “Broken Blossoms.” I’ve been meaning to watch this movie, but never have. I’ll grab it off Netflix tonight.
Thank you for this clip, and for the whole series.
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