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John Ford's How Green Was My Valley

© David Macdonald

Before John Ford became a legendary director of Westerns, he was directing movies that won him Oscars. It is a very strange thing that Ford won many Best Director Oscars, but not for any of his Westerns which made his reputation. There is nothing of the cowboy in The Informer, The Grapes of Wrath, How Green Was My Valley, or The Quiet Man, although John Wayne is in that last film on that list.

How Green Was My Valley is more than just a Ford film, but also a notorious one, due to the fact that it won 1941 Best Picture Oscar over...... Citizen Kane. Purists who say that Kane is the best film of all time are still pretty ticked off that Orson Welles' masterpiece lost out to some corny, sentimental picture, but as the DVD commentary track points out (luckily I heard the important part, even though I only listened to about three minutes of it!), Welles was a huge fan of Ford, and learned a lot from watching his movies, so I doubt that Welles would have been psychotically upset at losing to such a guy.

True, Citizen Kane is the better movie, but How Green Was My Valley is not a waste, not with John Ford directing. It may not seem that way at first for some people, however -- the film suffers from the fact of its vintage, as the acting can range at times to melodramatic and over-the-top, and the music is fairly sappy. But the story is still fairly interesting.

The film takes place at a mining village in Scotland (actually filmed on the Fox backlot, but you wouldn't know it), and the narrator is preparing to leave his hometown for what appears to be the final time. The story he is about to tell us is how, in his view, the world that he knew when he was growing up slowly disappeared for ever.

Most of the village men work in the mine, and need the mine for their livelihood. The mining company, however, exploits the workers to no end, to maximize profits. They cut wages, and soon, cut jobs as well. This creates talk of a union, which creates tension within the narrator's family. The three eldest boys strongly support a union, while the father does not -- the father mouths the church's belief that all forms of "socialism" are the devil's work. The tension is so strong that, for a while, the brothers leave home, unable to live with a man who doesn't want to be a part of something that will help the workers. The father himself becomes the target of attacks by other residents -- throwing stones to the windows, etc.

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