How Green Was My Valley
John Ford (1941)
John Ford was directing films well before the sound era. Watching How Green Was My Valley (for the first time), I kept thinking how much more stirring it could have been as a silent movie – for reasons positive and negative. This much-admired adaptation of Richard Llewellyn’s successful novel was released the year after The Grapes of Wrath, another Ford film widely considered a classic. Like that predecessor, this picture is visually remarkable. Whereas the black-and-white images of itinerant workers in The Grapes of Wrath often call to mind newsreel and photographs of the Great Depression, the lines of coal miners on their way to work in How Green Was My Valley suggest paintings of a vanished way of life. Following an accident underground, a crowd of villagers presses urgently to the colliery gates for news: these shots, while dynamic enough, have the look of a tableau vivant. Alfred C Miller’s lighting gives some of his black-and-white images of the village and surrounding countryside a nostalgic sheen in keeping with the film’s retrospective voiceover narrative. That voiceover, though, is among the negative reasons for thinking silence might have been golden.
I saw How Green Was My Valley just a few days after The Holly and the Ivy and with the matter of regional accents still on my mind. The first voice heard in Ford’s film is Irving Pichel’s, as the older version of the protagonist, Huw Morgan. Huw recalls his boyhood, as part of a working-class South Wales family in the last years of the nineteenth century, as he prepares now to bid farewell to the place. (The opening lines are: ‘I am packing my belongings in the shawl my mother used to wear when she went to the market. And I’m going from my valley. And this time, I shall never return. I am leaving behind me my fifty years of memory. Memory …’) Pichel sounds vaguely Irish; plenty of other voices in what’s to come will follow suit. Those who don’t sound vaguely Irish sound decidedly Irish and that’s because they were: Sara Allgood as Huw’s mother; Maureen O’Hara as his sister, Angharad; Arthur Shields, one of the deacons at the village chapel; Barry Fitzgerald, manager of Dai Bando, a local boxer. According to Wikipedia, Rhys Williams, who plays Dai, was the sole Welshman in the cast (even though one of Huw’s five brothers is played by one Evans S Evans).
Maybe it didn’t matter to Ford, let alone to the average American audience, how the actors sounded. All that counted, it seems, was for the salt-of-the-earth Morgan family and others in their community to register vocally as different from – socially inferior but morally superior to – the few RP English-speaking characters in the story. (The latter include Huw’s sadistic schoolmaster (Morton Lowry) and the playground bully (Clifford Severn) with whom the hero comes to blows on his first day at school.) To these British ears, however, most of the voices were jarringly odd, especially since Philip Dunne’s script makes so much of the characters’ Welshness. The middle-aged Huw Morgan tells us that ‘singing is in my people as sight is in the eye’. And how: particularly in the early stages of the film, a male-voice choir (according to Pauline Kael, the singers really were Welsh) is on the soundtrack as often as Alfred Newman’s richly maudlin score. In the home straight Newman’s music starts to get the better of the competition. It’s another irritant on the ear.
Dwelling on what may be thought a trivial aspect of the film reflects my failure to engage more strongly with How Green Was My Valley[1]. Even so, I could appreciate John Ford’s storytelling skills, and a few, variously impressive performances – from Roddy McDowall as the boy Huw, Donald Crisp as his father, and Sara Allgood. Ford’s portrait of the life of a community – its limits and perils, its hopes and fears of change – is developed very well. Gwilym Morgan (Crisp) and Huw’s five elder brothers are all miners (played by, as well as Evan S Evans, Richard Fraser, Patric Knowles, John Loder and James Monks). The father falls out with his sons when they join a strike in protest at the mineowner (Lionel Pape)’s reduction of their wages. Later on, it’s Gwilym who’s anxious for Huw to avoid work in the pit, in contrast to the boy’s mother, with her persisting scepticism about the point of education. Huw decides to turn down a scholarship and work in the mines to help provide for his widowed sister-in-law Bronwyn (Anna Lee) and her child. Bronwyn’s baby is born on the same day that her husband Ivor (Knowles), the eldest Morgan brother, is killed at work. Two more of the brothers lose their jobs in favour of cheaper labour and go abroad.
Compared with these events, the unhappy love life of Angharad Morgan feels forced and melodramatic. She falls for Gruffydd, the energetic, principled but, as interpreted by Walter Pidgeon, dull pastor at the chapel. Gruffydd loves Angharad back but feels his slender means prevent his marrying her. Instead, she accepts the hand of the mineowner’s son (Marten Lamont). Her face on their wedding day says it all and the marriage fails, scandalising the village’s moral guardians. Despite the euphonious hymn-singing, Welsh chapel culture is far from sentimentalised: Ford doesn’t stint on showing its cruelly censorious aspect. It would be wrong, too, to give the impression that the film’s visual virtues are only pictorial. There’s a fine sequence, following the climactic accident in the mine, where cages that carry the workforce up and down return successively to the surface – and to increasingly suspenseful effect. A couple of the cages hold survivors. More of them are empty.
29 December 2020
[1] Afternote (December 2022): The BBC television adaptation of the novel, first shown in 1975-76 and recently repeated as one of the BBC centenary drama offerings, couldn’t be more different in this respect. Written by Elaine Morgan and directed by Ronald Wilson, this version often feels rushed and lacks narrative rhythm but the extra length allows time to develop the story’s social themes more fully and the actors to build richer characterisations: the result is always involving, often moving. The splendid cast includes Sian Phillips, Nerys Hughes, Keith Drinkel, Mike Gwilym, Norman Comer, Sue Jones-Davies, Dominic Guard, Rhys Powys, Gareth Thomas, Ray Smith, John Clive, Sheila Ruskin, Clifford Rose and, best of all (as the Morgan paterfamilias), the great Stanley Baker, in one of his last roles.