Father's Day Drama: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Directed by John Ford

Here is my family’s favorite film of all time!

I once asked a friend of mine, a scholar of film, whether any director in our time could have directed How Green Was My Valley. He said that no director other than John Ford could have done even two minutes of it. It is so profoundly lyrical, so human, saying so much in the fine narrative voice that sets up the scenes, so much in the crisp dialogue, but always more, far more, in a look in the eyes, a motion of the hand. It is a film in which the terrible work of sin, in its forms as hardness of heart, avarice, and a willingness to believe the worst of others, slowly corrodes and ruins a small coal-mining village in Wales, the green valley of the title — both of the film and of the autobiographical book by Richard Llewellyn, the film’s source. And yet the prime mover of the film is not anger or sadness, but gratitude, and a solemn joy that does not fear sadness, loss, and death. “Men like my father can never die,” says the narrator Huw Morgan, who recalls the days when he was a boy. “They are with me still.”

The film is set in Cwm Rhondda, and most of the men in the village, and the boys too, go down into the earth to hack away at coal. The Morgan family is among them, with their six sons and one daughter, Angharad (Maureen O’Hara at her loveliest and most passionate). Huw (Roddy MacDowall) is the youngest, and his father, the essential patriarch (Donald Crisp), has sent him off to school to get some learning so that he will not have to ply the pick and shovel, and despite some sneering prejudice he must suffer at the beginning — and worse, but it gives Ford the opportunity to stage the most comic scene in the film. Huw does very well indeed, though his heart is still and always in Cwm Rhondda and with the rest of his family.

But the village is not at peace. The new pastor of the village church, Mr. Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon), attempts to reconcile the miners with the owners, as the latter have used the opportunity of suddenly available cheap labor to depress the men’s wages. Mr. Morgan has said to his sons that the owners would never do that, because “the owners are men such as we,” not savages. “The owners are men,” says his eldest son, “but not such as we,” because the owners have power, and the men do not. Hence he intends to form a union, against his father’s wishes, and when the father declines to join, he becomes a target of other men’s anger. And if you ever want to see what a good woman, here the bluff and hearty Beth Morgan (Sara Allgood), might say to a lot of surly men who have treated her husband badly, I tell you it has never been done better than here, with unexpected results.

I haven’t mentioned the sad love story, or the heroism of the preacher, the boy Huw, and the miners who come to the aid of their fellows when an explosion causes the walls of the mine to cave in. If it were for nothing but the music, we would treasure this film, filled as it is with Welsh hymns in the mother tongue (Bryn Calfaria, Calon Lan, Cwm Rhondda), and Welsh folk songs (Ash Grove, Men of Harlech), and the male choirs who do most of the singing. To Roman Catholics especially, I’ll say this: if you want to know what the Church’s social teaching looks like, in human and dramatic form, here it is, in a triumphant and uncompromising promotion of marriage, the household, family life, the centrality of worship, and what a neighborhood is for. Despite what the literati say about Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane, I believe that How Green Was My Valley well deserved the Best Picture award it won for 1941. And it was Welles himself, who, when he was asked who were the three greatest American directors, generously replied, “John Ford, John Ford, and John Ford.”