Oscars Retrospective: How Green Was My Valley (14th Academy Awards Review)

 

How Green Was My Valley Suite~Alfred Newman - How Green Was My Valley

John Ford is probably the most influential director of the Golden Age of Hollywood whose name might escape modern pop culture. While men like Walt Disney and Alfred Hitchcock still remain ubiquitous to the average moviegoer, Ford’s name remains obscure to all but the most devoted of cinephiles.

Ford was part of the first wave of Hollywood directors, arriving in Tinseltown back in 1914 and becoming one of the on-lot directors for Universal Pictures. From there, he made himself useful for the powers-that-be, having a steady and brisk pace of films made for the studio. His career received a relative breakout when he made The Informer (1935), which earned him the Oscar for Best Director, and then received an even bigger breakout when he made Stagecoach (1939), the film that revitalized the movie Western (both films we’ve discussed previously).

From here, Ford is a name that would become most well-known with the Western, particularly during the golden years of the genre in the 40s and 50s. His filmography, often paired with his iconic lead, John Wayne, contains some of the most famous Westerns ever such as She Wore A Yellow Ribbon (1949), The Searchers (1956) and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1963). His directing style, heavily influenced by F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927), has defined what you think of when you think of the Western: slow and plodding pace, long shots of beautiful nature and characters who move to these barren wastelands to seek redemption.

But all that was much later in his career. During the brief two-year window between when Stagecoach was released and the United States joined World War II (in which Ford served), John Ford’s career was on fire as he made hit after hit, all of which were beloved by the critics. His output in this era includes Drums Along the Mohawk (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940) and, finally, How Green Was My Valley, which took home the Oscars for Outstanding Motion Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actor, Best Black-and-White Cinematography and Best Black-And-White Art Direction.

How Green Was My Valley is a film that shows the life of a blue-collar coal mining family in south Wales called the Morgans, seen through the eyes of its youngest son, Huw (Roddy McDowell), showing the gradual erosion of this way of life. It seems like the Welsh equivalent to Gone With the Wind (1939), and Ford did originally want to treat it in that manner. The original plan was to make the movie about 4 hours long and shoot on location in Wales. Unfortunately, the ongoing war in Europe put a stop to both of those ideas (films during this time period had trouble recouping their budgets since the European market was closed off on account of World War II).

This is seriously what John Ford actually looked like.

Of course, making a movie like this 4 hours sounds about as appealing as spending a weekend at Guantanamo Bay after it’s been taken over by the Spanish Inquisition. How Green Was My Valley is the most boring film I’ve had to review for this series since Cavalcade (1933). While Cavalcade is still the worse movie, it was at the very least easy to articulate why that movie sucked. How Green Was My Valley is a film that’s still lauded by modern cinephiles and has even been inducted into the Library of Congress for its significance. It’s the type of movie that, on paper, doesn’t sound bad and isn’t even bad while you’re watching it; it’s just sooooooo dull. And, just like Cavalcade, it tricks you by having its most interesting plot thread open the movie and then speedily resolves it in such a way that leaves the modern viewer disappointed and bored.

The Morgan family is led by its patriarch, Gwilym (Donald Crisp), who, along with his five oldest sons (who all could very easily have been condensed into just one or two), works in the local coal mine. After the mine owner starts garnishing wages, the miners walk out and start striking. This leads to a rift in the family as Gwilym wants to be the mediator and refuses to join the strikers while his sons become the strike leaders. This leads to little Huw being caught in the crossfire between his parents and his five older brothers. While this certainly sounds like a great setup, it resolves itself pretty early on in the film and then just lazies between showing the various parts of living in Victorian Wales.

Shouldn’t this strike be later in the movie after we’ve gotten to know the characters better? This seems like it should be one of the things that leads to the family breaking up and falling apart. Especially since the climax of the movie is just a mining accident that causes the community to band together. Wouldn’t this be more palpable if the community banding together happened after the whole back half of the movie being set against a feud created by a strike? After the film was over, I wasn’t even entirely sure how it really showed the falling apart of this idyllic culture or how the main character came of age.

Comparing How Green Was My Valley to Gone With the Wind might be the easiest way to explain why I don’t like this movie. For one thing, Gone With the Wind had more running time, allowing its depiction of the death of a civilization to be given proper breathing room and showing the conflicts one at a time. More importantly, however, Scarlett O’Hara is such an electrifying and complex main character that you’re never quite fully sure of what she’s going to do next. This makes her story so much more interesting because it’s her story, not just the story of the South. Most of the side-characters that surround her are also pretty complex and 3-dimensional, which makes them more fun for Scarlett to bounce off of. You could put her into almost any other story and she would still be a great character to follow.

How Green Was My Valley, by contrast, lazies between its various plots and subplots without much forward momentum and the kid is just… a kid. Not much depth, not much interest. Even the cinematography, which is by far the best part of the movie and is very gorgeous, presents problems. The movie is in black-and-white, which was standard for the time so I’m not going to begrudge it too much, but Gone With the Wind’s producers splurged for the color cinematography and it made the movie all the better for it. In Gone With the Wind, the color of the Tara plantation is a character in and of itself and we see how the locale changes throughout the years. When I think of How Green Was My Valley, I think of smog-choked chimneys and blasted hilltops surrounding the mining village; not a whole lot of beautiful imagery to symbolize childhood innocence.

Especially since the movie is called How Green Was My Valley and we don’t see any green.

The characters are also pretty dull. Not really bad but none of them are electrifying either or have the colorful, unique and memorable personalities that a film like this kinda demands. The only two I remember is Huw’s abusive teacher, Mr. Jonas (Morton Lowry) and Donald Crisp is pretty likable as the father. Though, to be fair, he’s also just playing the same character he plays in every movie he’s ever in as the strict but lovable Anglican father. I liked him better as this character in the Lassie movies.

In regards to the ambling plot structure, it’s my understanding that the book that this movie was based on is a quasi-autobiographical telling of the author’s own experiences growing up with his mining grandfather in the real-life town of Gilfach Goch. The movie is largely a one-to-one adaptation of the book, kinda making it a loose biopic. Thus, How Green Was My Valley has the same problem that a lot of biopics have from the same era of the classic age of Hollywood in that it doesn’t present a lot of discipline in actually trying to fit real-life events into a digestible structure.

If you watch a biopic from the classic age of cinema (e.g. The Great Ziegfeld (1936), Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), The Pride of the Yankees (1942)), they usually depict the subject’s whole life one piece at a time before climaxing with a big speech. Thus, they’re more like watching a biography than an actual movie, but without a lot of the flavor and eloquence that a good book can present. As a result, they lack the 3-act structure that most good screenwriters abide by. By contrast, a modern biopic will usually focus on just one interesting moment in the subject’s life for a story (e.g. Downfall (2004), Lincoln (2012), Selma (2014)) or feature people whose lives had enough ups and downs that it actually can fit into the 3-act structure (e.g. Malcolm X (1992), Ed Wood (1996), The Wolf of Wall Street (2013)). Armed with this knowledge, a lot of old-school biopics can feel like a chore to get through if you try to watch them.

How Green Was My Valley is no exception. Even though it’s fictionalized, it still has the same trappings of trying to be “real” but even that argument falls apart. There’s a sub-plot where Huw has to deal with an aforementioned abusive teacher so he decides to take some boxing lessons from the town’s local boxers (Rhys Williams and Barry Fitzgerald). Upon learning that the teacher is abusive, the boxers then walk into the schoolroom and beat up Mr. Jonas in front of the classroom. That’s not something that happens in real life; that’s one hundred percent a Hollywood fantasy. You can’t have it both ways. Either the movie is a very exact slice-of-life tale or it has the Hollywood-isms of peddling a fantasy, not both.

How Green Was My Valley is a film that’s made for an audience with a very acquired taste and that taste usually works best if you were born before the JFK assassination. It’s a plodding, dull movie about a family that I couldn’t care less about with a style that's too whimsical to be a realistic film but too realistic to be a Hollywood fairy tale. The time you would spend watching this movie would probably be better spent watching grass grow. Despite this, you can still respect it for its technical mastery.

But would that be enough to call it movie of the year though?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2