How Green Was My Valley (1941)
How Green Was My Valley is a beautiful and heart-wrenching film. It's both idealistic and sentimental, yet it's depiction of the disintegration of a culture and way of life, set against the changing social mores of the time using the trials and tribulations of the Morgan family as metaphor, is handled deftly by the great director John Ford and his superb cast.
The film covers a number of story arcs, from the forbidden attraction between Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon) - an educated outsider who comes to the village to preach at the local chapel - and Angharad Morgan (Maureen O'Hara) and her subsequent unhappy marriage to the pit owners son, to the heroes journey of young Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowall) to better himself and escape the trappings of the rustic life alongside the struggle of tradition against change as seen through the frugal yet warm and moralistic Morgan family patriarch Gwilym Morgan (Donald Crisp).
The village appears idyllic and harmonious, a rural community built around a coal-pit reaping the benefits of its labour, but over time as the pit owner seeks to make more profits and with the ever growing surplus of workers, they begin laying off the older better paid men with the younger more unskilled who they can pay less wages to. We see a still half agrarian and feudal culture slowly declining, it's notions of morality being questioned against the shadow of a encroaching and ever more pernicious Capitalism tearing at the social fabric of community and family. It's an age old story and just as poignant today.
The most emotional element of the film features young Huw Morgan who loses the use of his legs and is comforted and cajoled back to health by Mr. Gruffydd. Gruffydd acts as a culturing influence on Huw and soon he regains the use of his legs and becomes the first of his family and the entire community to venture outside the village and be educated at school. He soon discovers that for all the hypocrisies of the local culture, its petty quarrels, small mindedness and gutter talk, the wider world itself offers further challenges and the village - for all its hypocrisy - is a nurturing environment. He is beaten by his school mates and his school master, but when the locals discover this he is taught to box and to defend himself, in this climate of change and uncertainty in Huw we see a child making the journey into adulthood. His subsequent academic successes are sadly overshadowed by the death of his brother in an accident in the coal pit and although his father Gwilym encourages him to continue his studies and has wishes for his son to better himself, Huw decides to return home and to become a miner like his brothers, his aspirations cut short.
The myth of John Ford as a patriotic right-winger seems all but irrelevant after viewing How Green Was My Valley which speaks more to the importance of family and community of altruism and good will and speaks to some greater truth about human nature. In our ever more technologically interlinked yet segregated and atomised culture, amidst the constant light of media and communication, films like How Green Was My Valley become more prophetic, more and more important and yet somehow sorrowful because they speak to our continual decline in the face of the politics of neo-liberalism and profit.
