149. How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Directed By John Ford

Synopsis

Welsh Miners Is People!

Review

John Ford is known primarily for his westerns, but there have been two Ford films on the list which are quite competent non-westerns. Of course Grapes was by far more competent than this film. Still, How Green Was My Valley is a good film, albeit not great. There are loads of things wrong with it. Firstly I have been to Wales. It doesn't look like that. There is nowhere near enough mud.

The big problem here is the "imagination" of what Wales must be like, there's a close harmony male choir for every occasion. There's an "I've just cut my toenails" song and a "I feel a bit under the weather" song. It comes across as silly. It also comes across as a melodrama and we are a bit past that by now.

Ford does continue to make his socialist points here with the defence of unionisation, for a guy who was so right wing Ford does come across a bit reddish. I think the problem is that Communism was so demonised that if you were a decent and humane person you would still have socialist ideas even if you would never call them socialist.

Final Grade

7/10

Trivia

From Wikipedia:

Director John Ford wanted to shoot the movie in its natural setting, Wales, but events in Europe, World War II made his goal impossible.

Instead, Ford built a replica of the mining town at the close-to 3,000 acre Fox Ranch in Malibu Canyon, where My Friend Flicka and M*A*S*H were also shot.

The beginning of the film, sorry for the Spanish subtitles: