How Green was my Valley

 In John Ford's 1941 How Green was my Valley, there is a startling disconnect between the film's elegiac tone, wistful, melancholy, and romantic, and the rather stark series of tragedies that make up the picture's plot.  Ford invites us to feel nostalgia for a way of life that is shown to be cruel, isolated, and impoverished.  There is something similar at work in Ford's Westerns (the 1941 Oscar-winning film is set in a coal-mining village is Wales) but the ultimate emotional effect is different.  In pictures like My Darling Clementine and She wore a Yellow Ribbon, Ford celebrates tightly knit communities isolated by the deserts and mountains of the American southwest.  Terrible things happen in these movies but the doom or tragedy that hovers over How Green was my Valley is avoided by our sense that everything turned out for the best in the end -- the West was settled, civilization prevailed, women tamed the brutish outlaws and ranchers, the noble but unpredictably violent Indians were defeated; as in The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence, gunmen and desperadoes gave way to lawyers and school marms and journalists. In America, at least, we in the audience are evidence that there was a happy ending to the events chronicled in these films.  Ford can't supply this happy ending in How Green was my Valley and, so, the viewer leaves the movie with a sense of terrible, pointless loss.  Obviously, audiences originally responded to the movie's apparently warm-hearted nostalgia, but an account of what actually occurs in the film will belie the notion that the picture is cheerful or happy in any way.

A village in the mountains of Wales supports a coal factory that seems to be the only enterprise (except for a church and a pub, The Three Pennies) in the town.  (This is similar to Ford's isolated ranches in Monument Valley and his frontier cavalry posts and hamlets -- usually characterized by a saloon, a grave-yard, and a clapboard church.)  The people in the town seem to be satisfied with their lot in life as epitomized by the Morgan family, the focus of the film .  The Morgan's consist of five stalwart brothers who labor alongside their father in the colliery, a beautiful adult daughter, and a small boy, the baby of the family, played brilliantly by the young Roddy McDowell as "Hue."  The family's religious and worn-out mother provides this clan with huge roast beef suppers and everyone eats well; although a family this large crammed into a row-house a few hundred yards from a purgatorial coal pit would likely be living in squalor, Ford shows clean spacious interiors, plenty of room for feasting and bible-reading and joshing around.  But, after a brief idyllic introduction, overlaid with scrumptious and poetic narration from the 1939 source novel, verse spoken in terms of remembrance of things past, things begin to go badly wrong.

The owners of the coal mine reduce workers wages arbitrarily.  This leads to the sons, who are firebrands, planning to form a Union.  But the father, played by Donald Crisp, opposes unions as "socialism" and tensions threaten to tear the family apart.  Two of the boys depart for America, despairing of a any sort of equity in the village.  When the father continues to oppose the Union, violence erupts and brickbats are thrown through the windows of the Morgan home.  The mother with Hue in tow attend a Union meeting in a driving snowstorm.  The mother fiercely says that if anyone harms her family she will kill the perpetrator "with (her) own two hands."  On the way home, however, she and Hue somehow fall through the ice in a creek and are left wallowing in the icy water for several hours.  Both mother and the little boy are badly hurt and the doctor says that Hue's legs, "frozen to the bone," will be paralyzed.  (The prediction turns out wrong and Hue gradually learns to walk again, encouraged by the local pastor.)  The labor unrest is finally brought to an end by the kindly preacher, Mr. Griffins, who endorses the Union as long as it plays by the rules.  The preacher is in love with the adult daughter in the family (Maureen O'Sullivan) and she requites the affection.  But, after the the strike is settled, the owner of the mine, Mr. Evans, sends his son to court the young woman who is the town beauty.  She marries Evans' son and departs for South Africa, blighting both her life and the pastor's romantic hopes.  One of the sons is killed in a mine accident.  Hue, who is a clever boy (and a surrogate for the author of the novel) does well in school, with the help of the preacher studies for exams, and is admitted to a nearby "National School".  Here the little boy is brutalized by bullies and savagely beaten by the fey, sadistic schoolmaster who despises him as "as coal vermin."  Hue is taught by a local pugilist to box and defeats the bully but, then, gets flogged by the schoolmaster until "the flesh is ripped from the bone."  The pugilist and one of his buddies then beat the schoolmaster senseless and leave him for dead in his classroom.  Hue, despite his intelligence, decides to follow the family tradition and goes to work in the infernal-looking black hole of the mine.  (The other two brothers have departed for Canada and New Zealand).  The family's sister returns  from South Africa as a rich, but miserable.  She understands that she has ruined her life by marrying the son of the colliery's owner.  She is apparently divorced, although this information leaks out only gradually to the complete horror and Schadenfreude of the local gossips (who seem to comprise the entire female cohort in the village).  Rumors about the sister lead to more strife and fist-fights.  There's a cave-in and explosion at the mine and the father is crushed to death in the debris.  His son, Hue, the pugilist who is now blind, a few other heroes search through the frightening flooded mine-shaft to discover the old man pinned in the wreckage -- this is a spectacular sequence filmed in the florid style of silent cinema.  The corpse is lifted out of the pit with other bodies on the elevator that serves as a visual motif through the film. And, on this note, the movie ends.  As if to underscore, the unhappiness that we have witnessed, Ford ends with a montage of the family together at a meal, then, the daughter courting the kindly preacher, and, at last, Mr. Morgan, the father, and little Hue strolling through a flowery meadow.  But we know that the meadow no longer exists; the slag heaps now have destroyed the valley.  (The movie, apparently, dilutes considerably the novel's pro-Union and socialist subject matter.)

The film is extremely beautiful and carefully constructed.  The set, a fish-hook shaped lane ascending a  hill on which a Golgotha of colliery works is silhouetted against the sky, is one of Hollywood's greatest creations -- the row-houses and the curving street are all beautifully depicted and the mine smoke against the sky lend a dramatic aspect to the vista.  The row-houses all have their own small yards, enclosed by white picket fences shown in perspective.  The visual aspect of the film often invokes D. W. Griffith -- pictorial space is clearly defined, rhyming shots establish place, usually in tableaux from the same perspective, and the interiors are all spacious, luminous with light, each household item where it is supposed to be, often outlined (or underlined) by shadow. (The impression that Griffith underlies many of the epic shots is strengthened by the fact that the father is played by Donald Crisp, a stalwart in the Old Master's movies -- he played the vicious brute "Battling Burrows" who beats Lillian Gish to death in the 1919 Broken Blossoms.) Everything in the picture is clean and tidy.  The platoons of coal-blackened men trudging along the lanes are like the workers in Fritz Lang's Metropolis, automatons in an industrial army.  There are innumerable pictorial effects -- for instance, when the daughter is unhappily married to the rich man's son, she wears a long white veil that balloons out above and behind her like baroque wings.  Everyone is always singing.  When the town's choir is invited to sing for the Queen, we see the men standing on stone risers, performing a chorale while the camera tracks discreetly to the side, showing the last two adult sons leaving town to go abroad, shadowy figures vanishing down the gloomy street.  A woman who has had an illegitimate child is accused by the hypocritical church deacon whose trembling, pointing figure is shot in huge close-up at the center of the screen.  In some scenes involving the strike and labor unrest, Ford imitates Eisenstein, showing us friezes of marching men, tilted upward by the sharp ascent to the colliery on the hilltop.  Music of all sorts abounds-- the narrator in his voice-over tells us that "song was in the hearts of the people like sight is in their eyes."  It's a spectacularly beautiful movie, exquisitely shot and imagined.  And it's certainly "adult" in ways more challenging and alien than many contemporary movies.  The viewer expects that the beautiful daughter will somehow be reunited with her lost love, Mr. Griffiths.  But this doesn't happen.  Griffiths gives a bitter speech about the small-mindedness and bigotry in the village, accuses himself of having failed to teach anyone the gospel, and, then, departs forever.  Presumably, the daughter will live out the remainder of her life, embittered and solitary, trapped in the big white house on the hill.  The lyric tone of the film -- it is intensely poetic -- doesn't match the parade of horrors that we have been shown.