FILM REVIEWS

 
Based on Richard Llewellyn’s novel, adapted to the screen by Philip Dunne, “How Green” tells the story of a Welsh mining family, narrated by its youngest son, Huw Morga (child actor Roddy McDowall). Ford’s idealized view of the past is seen through the memory of the boy, surrounded as he is by a large, loving family. As in other films, Ford draws parallels between the breakdown of the Morgan family and that of the surrounding community, and by implication America society at large.

“How Green Was My Valley” is one of Ford’s most beautiful, if sentimental, pictures. The critic Andrew Sarris has described the movie as an elegiac poem, and for many it was. The film’s portrayal of the disintegration of a mining community is of epic and heroic dimensions.
Nominated for ten Oscars, the film won five, honoring Ford’s Direction, Arthur Miller’s Cinematography and Art direction. Sara Allgood was nominated for Supporting Actress, as the gentle but strong mother, Beth Morgan, and Donald Crisp won the Supporting Actor Oscar for playing Mr. Morgan, the stern patriarch who’s later killed in the mine.

In one of the emotionally touching speeches, the never-seen narrator (Irving Pichel), who plays the grow-up version of Roddy McDowall, says: “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’d heard them only yesterday.”

Not to be underestimated is the fact that “How Green” film was selected by the Academy voters while the U.S. had already been involved in the War. The film’s warmly sympathetic depiction of family unity must have hit deep chords in the country’s collective consciousness, which may explain, at least in part, why its two major competitors, Orson Welles’s masterpiece, “Citizen Kane” and William Wyler’s “The Little Foxes,” each with nine nominations, were the losers. Both films, and particularly “Little Foxes,” represented dark and somber visions of the American family.

Once again, the “right” contents and ideological approach made the difference, though it’s noteworthy that “How Green” was as visually distinguished, as it was thematically acceptable.