“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.”
Nominated for the 1941 Academy Award for Outstanding Motion Picture in a pack including classics like The Little Foxes (William Wyler, 1941), The Maltese Falcon (John Huston, 1941), Sergeant York (Howard Hawks, 1941), and Suspicion (Alfred Hitchcock, 1941), the win for How Green Was My Valley boils down to the director John Ford, who made Stagecoach (1939) and The Grapes of Wrath (1940) in the preceding two years. Also, Valley is the quintessence of sentimental pablum, whereas one other key nominee, Citizen Kane (Orson Welles, 1941), is the epitome of innovative and irritating brilliance.
Favoring one side of the gap between reassurance and experimentation, How Green Was My Valley begins with the voice-over of a 60-year-old Welshman, Huw Morgan, (Irving Pichel), who reflects on his youthful self, played by Roddy McDowall. As the youngest member of his family, Huw is born to great expectations that he might know a life beyond the mines of his hometown, and the tension between his potential and the material facts of everyday life marble the story with a sense of melancholy.
This tendency begins with the past tense “was” of the movie’s title, inherited from the source novel by Richard Llewellyn, as well as the fact that 60-year-old Huw still lives in the same mining village where he was born. In other words, the opening narration, and subsequent voice-over sound bridges, center Huw’s point-of-view as the one we most value, but it’s equally true that Huw might have escaped tradition and then didn’t, which makes the movie somewhat dark and depressing.
Huw grows up in a family lorded over by his father Gwilym (Donald Crisp) and heartened by his mother, Beth (Sara Allgood). Immediately complicating things are the nuptials of elder brother, Ianto (John Loder), and the lovely Bronwyn (Anna Lee) with whom Huw is smitten.
Because the story is set in a 19th century Welsh town that’s losing its economic base to industrialization, we quickly learn that coal prices are dropping along with personal wages. So, the Morgans scramble to make ends meet. The local preacher, Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon), champions unionization and directs a miner’s strike to demand higher wages and more humane conditions. This throws the Morgans into disarray when Gwilym sides with his employer against the preferences of his several sons. Caught in the middle are Huw and his sister Angharad (Maureen O’Hara) who secretly loves Mr. Gruffydd.
Angharad is eventually married off to the mine owner’s son, much to her chagrin and Mr. Gruffydd’s disappointment, and Ianto is killed in a wall collapse, causing his brothers to migrate to America. When Angharad returns home, mid-divorce, Mr. Gruffydd comes under attack for his liberal beliefs and is run out of town, though not before he and Angharad exchange their feelings of devotion.
Another mine tunnel collapses, trapping Gwilym. Among the men, Huw climbs down the tunnels to find his father, and the pair embrace as the senior Morgan draws final breath and dies. Bringing the old man to the surface, Huw accepts the yoke of family provider, thereby giving up any other potential future in the face of tragedy.
Into this divide between tradition and progress, Ford successfully wraps enough good Christian ethics and populist folk wisdom to sidetrack discussion of what the film is trying to say. Leaving aside high-quality images, a good score, vivid production design, and reliable performances, the on-screen values, here, are squarely New Deal in nature, making How Green Was My Valley the portrait of one family sundered by the paradigm shift toward a global economy then re-making the world. As a metaphor for American life in mid-1941, this story strikes a futile, yet resistant, note against the coming war at almost the same moment Henry Luce exhorted each of us to help create, “the first great American Century.”
–December 31, 2022
