How Green Was My Valley (1941) Review
7/10
An old man packs a bag and narrates the valley he is leaving. His father and five brothers work a colliery. Wages fall, a union forms, the family splits over it, and one by one everybody in the house goes somewhere else or dies.
The 7 is for a film that does one thing extremely well and is asked to carry a reputation it never sought. Ford made a family chronicle about work and its cost, and it is genuinely moving and has nothing to do with what Welles was doing in the same year.
I want to be clear about the argument on this page. This film should not have won and it is not a bad film, and those two statements are entirely compatible.
What Ford Was Making
The subject is a household and the specific mechanism by which industrial work dismantles it.
The structure is a series of departures. A brother marries and leaves, two are dismissed for union activity and emigrate, another dies in the pit, a sister marries badly and goes, and the film measures the family by who is at the table.
The film also counts them out loud. Huw narrates who has gone and where, and the departures are stated as a list instead of dramatized individually, which is what makes the table scenes land when the film returns to them.
The pit is filmed almost entirely as an exterior. Men going down, men coming up, the winding gear, the whistle, and the film shows the surface of the work and very little of the work itself, which is a budget decision that reads as a choice.
The slag heap is the film’s one honest image about the industry. It grows across the picture, is established early as small and is enormous by the end, and the film uses a spoil tip as a clock without ever pointing at it.
That is a genuinely good structure and it requires no plot. The table scene recurs, the number of chairs changes, and the film’s argument is delivered entirely through attendance.
The wage dispute is also handled with more complexity than the film’s reputation suggests. The father opposes the union, the sons support it, both positions are argued, and Ford does not resolve it in favor of either.
The strike itself happens largely offscreen. The film gives it a meeting, a decision and a consequence, and declines the picket-line sequence that almost any later treatment of the same material would have built the second act around.
Measure a family by who is present at a recurring event. A table, a service, a meal, and the changing count does the work of a chronicle without any narration. The device costs nothing and it is the most efficient way to convey the passage of years.
Give the older generation a coherent position. The father’s objection to the union is argued instead of dismissed, which is what keeps the film from being a pamphlet.
Departure is a stronger structure than decline. Each person leaves for their own reason, which means the family’s dissolution is a sequence of individual decisions instead of a trend.
It Is Beautiful and That Is the Problem
Arthur Miller won Best Cinematography and the film is photographed with enormous care, in deep focus, with the colliery and the terraced street built as a single enormous set on a California ranch.
The images are composed as memory. The valley is clean, the light is soft, the children are scrubbed, and the mining village looks like an illustration of a mining village.
That is a defensible choice, because the film is narrated by a man fifty years later remembering it. A remembered childhood is cleaner than a lived one and the film is explicit about the frame.
Zanuck also cut the film substantially from a much longer version and removed most of the overt politics, which is documented and explains why the union material feels curtailed instead of balanced.
It is also the reason the film reads as sentimental. The frame permits the softness and the softness is what the audience takes away, and a viewer who forgets the narration is watching a prettified account of industrial poverty.
Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood
Crisp won Supporting Actor and the performance is the best thing in the film, a father who is proud, inflexible, wrong about the union and entirely coherent.
What makes it work is that he is not softened. He throws his own sons out of the house over the dispute, does not apologize, and the film lets the estrangement stand for years without resolving it.
Sara Allgood as the mother has the film’s single best sequence, in which she walks to a union meeting in the snow, pregnant, and tells a hall full of men that anybody who threatens her husband will be dealt with by her.
Roddy McDowall was twelve and is the film’s center, and the performance is unusually unmannered for a child actor of the period. He watches, mostly, and the film is constructed so that his watching is the point of view.
His beating at school is the one sequence with real physical unpleasantness in it. He is thrashed by a teacher, the film does not soften it, and the boxers who train him afterward are the picture’s best small subplot.
Maureen O’Hara has the film’s other thread and the least resolved one. Angharad loves the minister, marries the mine owner’s son, and the film gives her a marriage it never shows and an unhappiness it never examines.
Do not soften the patriarch. A man who is wrong, throws out his own children and never apologizes is a character, and one who comes round is a lesson. The estrangement should last. Years of it, unresolved, is the truthful version.
Give the least powerful person in the household one scene of total authority. The mother’s walk to the union meeting is the film’s high point precisely because she has had no power anywhere else in it.
A child observer works when the child is not the subject. He watches and does not learn a lesson, and the film’s events happen to other people.
The Citizen Kane Question
Citizen Kane was nominated in nine categories and won one, for the screenplay. This film won five, including Picture and Director.
The mechanism is documented and is not mysterious. Hearst newspapers refused advertising for Kane and ran a campaign against Welles, RKO struggled to book it, and a substantial part of the industry regarded the film as an attack on a living man who could retaliate. Voting for it was a professional risk and voting for a Welsh family drama was not.
There is also a simpler explanation that gets less attention. Kane is a cold film about an unlikeable man, made by a twenty-six-year-old outsider with a theater company, and this is a warm film about a family made by a director the industry had already given two Oscars.
What the record shows is that the institution chose the safer and more comfortable of two available options, which is the thesis of the entire page this review appears on.
Ford also did not attend and was in the Navy within months, having been commissioned before the ceremony. He won four Best Director awards and never collected one in person.
Why It Has Aged Badly
The film’s reputation has declined and almost none of the decline is about the film.
It has become a shorthand. Any discussion of Academy error reaches for it inside two sentences, which means it is cited far more often than it is watched, and a film everybody mentions and nobody sees acquires a reputation it cannot answer.
The narration is also doing more than nostalgia. Huw is fifty years older and is leaving the valley for good as he speaks, and the frame is a man closing a door instead of a man fondly remembering anything.
The same has happened to Ordinary People and to Crash elsewhere on this page, and the pattern is worth naming. A film that becomes an example of institutional failure is punished twice, once by losing the argument and then again by never being watched by anybody afterward.
The specific charges are also inherited instead of observed. Sentimentality, which the frame justifies, and a prettified valley, which is a memory. Neither survives a viewing intact.
What has genuinely dated is the Welshness. An American production with Irish, English and American actors doing an accent nobody in Wales recognizes, shot in California, and the film’s relationship to the place it depicts is an approximation.
Richard Llewellyn wrote the novel and claimed it was autobiographical, and it was established decades later that he had never worked in a mine and had not grown up in Wales. The source was an invention presented as a memoir.
That is worth knowing and it does not damage the film. An invented memoir can be accurate about a feeling and this one clearly was, since the book sold enormously in Wales and the objections came later and from historians and not from readers.
A work that becomes an example stops being a work. It is cited instead of read, the charges against it are inherited, and nobody checks. There is nothing to be done about it and it is worth knowing that reputation and quality separate permanently once a shorthand forms.
Frames justify tone. If your account is warmer than the events, establish who is remembering, and the warmth becomes characterization instead of a failure of nerve.
Approximating a place will date faster than anything else in a work. The accent is what a modern audience notices first and it is the element nobody at the time thought about.
Should you watch How Green Was My Valley?
Yes, and watch it as a Ford family chronicle and not as the film that beat Citizen Kane. A household measured by who is still at the table, a father who throws out his sons and never apologizes, a mother’s one scene of total authority, and eighty-four years of being a trivia answer.
Frequently Asked Questions
This film appears on one of my film lists