How Green Was My Valley

Continuing my look at the Best Picture Oscar winners...

How Green Was My Valley took top honors in 1941, and today that victory is probably best-remembered because it beat out Citizen Kane (and The Maltese Falcon, one of my all-time favorites, to boot). If the film comes up in conversation today it usually is part of wondering how in the world Kane lost. Well, a simple look at the history tells why Kane lost, most of Hollywood hated it, and it was a box-office bust. And it's a shame, because though How Green Was My Valley is no Citizen Kane, it is still a terrific picture.

Valley is the story of a family in a Welsh mining town during the Victorian era, and as such, is a tear-jerker, which the Academy has long valued more than intellectual works of art like Citizen Kane. Directed by John Ford, and based on a best-selling novel, the film is lavish in sentiment and old-fashioned values like loyalty and community. It's easy to be cynical and dismiss these values, but Ford's brilliance as a filmmaker makes this all work.

The Morgan family are headed by Donald Crisp and Sarah Allgood (both Oscar-nominated, Crisp won). They have six sons and one daughter, and all the boys end up working in the coal mine. One of them is quite a bit younger, Roddy McDowall, and his character narrates the story looking back as an adult. The daughter, Maureen O'Hara, loves the town minister, Walter Pidgeon, but marries the mine-owner's son, whom she does not love, because Pidgeon says he won't see her live in poverty. There is also labor-strife, a fall through the ice, a mean schoolmaster, and other assorted episodes, both tragic and comic, throughout the story.

This Twentieth-Century Fox production was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck, who originally wanted William Wyler to direct and it to be shot in Technicolor, in an attempt to duplicate the success of Gone With the Wind. It was also hoped to be shot on location in Wales, but after the war broke out, Wales became a target for the German Luftwaffe and instead Malibu had to do. It also ended up in Ford's hands, and in black and white, photographed by Arthur Miller, who won the Oscar (as did Ford, his second in a row as Best Director). It did end up a smash hit, though, the highest-grossest picture of the year.

This is the kind of movie that you can stumble across on a Sunday afternoon or late-night on TV and watch for a while, not necessarily to the end. I had seen parts of it before (I vividly remember the schoolmaster getting his comeuppance for daring to savagely beat poor Roddy McDowall) but I don't think I'd ever seen the whole thing through before this time. It's a very good film and, interestingly enough, John Ford's favorite of his films.