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DVD How Green Was My Valley
John Ford's beautiful, heartfelt drama about a close-knit family of Welsh coal miners is one of the greatest films of Hollywood's golden age--a gentle masterpiece that beat Citizen Kane in the Best Picture race for the 1941 Academy Awards. The picture also won Oscars for Best Director (Ford), Best Supporting Actor (Donald Crisp), Best Art Direction, and Best Cinematography; all of those awards were richly deserved, even if they came at the expense of Kane and Orson Welles. Based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn, the film focuses its eventful story on 10-year-old Huw (Roddy McDowall), youngest of seven children to Mr. and Mrs. Morgan (Donald Crisp, Sarah Allgood), a hardy couple who've seen the best and worst of times in their South Wales mining town. They're facing one of the worst times as Mr. Morgan refuses to join a miners union whose members have begun a long-term strike. Family tensions grow and Huw must learn many of life's harsher lessons under the tutelage of the local preacher (Walter Pidgeon), who has fallen in love with Huw's sister (Maureen O'Hara). As various crises are confronted and devastating losses endured, How Green Was My Valley unfolds as a rich, moving portrait of family strength and integrity. It's also a nod to a simpler, more innocent time--and to the preciousness of memory and the inevitable passage from youth to adulthood. An all-time classic, not to be missed. --Jeff Shannon
Filmed in 1941, this is a sweeping family drama set in a small Welsh coal mining town at the turn of the century. The family is leading an idyllic life. Five of the six sons work in the mine alongside the father. All get good wages and there is plenty of food on the table. The townspeople even have a choir and there is singing throughout. The sixth son, a child, played by Roddy McDowall who was then 13 years old, narrates the story as events change their lives. He observes his brother's marriage, a strike at the mine, the unrequited love of his sister, played by a youthful Maureen O'Hara with the Minister, Walter Pidgeon, and some terrible mine accidents. Donald Crisp plays the father and Sara Allgood the mother and I could easily sympathize with the joys and trials of holding their large family together.
As this film was adapted from a novel, it was packed with many episodes, not all of which were fully developed. However, there was enough to hold my interest throughout. Filmed in black and white without any of today's special effects, the cinematographers did an excellent job of depicting the small town as well as the work inside of a coal mine. While watching the video I couldn't help thinking about the particular changes that time has brought to the movies. Specifically I thought about the actors, most of them now dead or elderly and the power of film to capture them in time. I personally felt a distance from this film. My emotions stayed restricted to analyzing the actor's performances and thinking about how the film was made. Perhaps the story was a bit too sentimental for my tastes, but I never really got caught up in it. So even though this is a fine film, I don't know if it has stood the test of time well. It's a good film. I recommend it. It just doesn't make my "top films of all time" list.
How Green Was My Valley: A Life-Affirming Movie
There is a genre of films whose underlying theme is the continuity of the family. In such movies, the family unit is placed at the dramatic center, often facing challenges from the external world that threaten the solidarity of its internal cohesiveness. Such a film is HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY, which traces the evolution of one middle class Welsh family over a period of many years. The narrator is an adult whose memories of his youth form the basis of the film. Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowell) recalls his life beginning when he was about thirteen. What he sees and relates is not only the changes that his family goes through, but he also notes the symbiotic interaction that society has on them. At the start of the movie, life for the Morgan family is pleasant. The family unit is cohesive, loving, and disciplined. His father Gwilym (Donald Crisp) controls them with a stern but loving hand. His mother Beth (Sara Allgood) is the loving mother who seems to spend most of her time as an eternal washerwoman. He has five older brothers and a sister Angharad (Maureen O'Hara), who silently loves the unapproachable village vicar Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon). Soon enough, a changing society exerts a corrosive effect on the Morgans. The villain is not any one person, although the mine owner has been unfairly castigated for that. Rather, the creeping evil is a changing society that slowly is evolving from an agricultural base to a mechanized one. Workers at the mine are being downsized so they strike, and this strike sets is motion other wheels which further flatten the once strong solidarity of the Morgan family. The Morgan sons quarrel with the father over the strike and move out of the house. The daughter Angharad loves the vicar Gruffydd, who must reject her because of his clerical collar, so she is pressured into a loveless marriage with another. And there are several tragic accidents at the mine that are fatal for some of the male Morgans. While all this is going on, Huw sees the changes and feels the pain of their consequences. His schooling is a disaster as he is beaten mercilessly with a cane by his teacher. He suffers but does not know how to reconcile his suffering with the words of patience doled out by the vicar. There is no traditional happy ending, except that some of the Morgan family adjust to changes in their macrocosmic and microcosmic universe. Huw hears the words of endurance and tries to live by their meaning. At the end of the film, Huw is now an adult, with an adult's vision, but it is not clear if the joy he feels at the telling of his story is the joy only of joyous memories or the clarity of vision that his youthful pentitences have so painfully taught him. HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY was a deserved winner of an Oscar for Best Picture. Donald Crisp won Best Suporting Actor for his role of the crochety but understanding Gwilym Morgan. What this movie suggests is that the inspiration one needs to overcome adversity need not be found only in the wisdom of others. Sometimes, it can be found within one's own heart. Huw Morgan found that out even as a child.
I Love This Movie
The first time I watched this movie I was blown away. I have seen nearly all of Ford's major films, but only the Grapes of Wrath astounded me quite on this level. Everything about this film is beautiful. Roddy McDowell's performance is excellent and memorable. The little town feels alive and real.
A movie doesn't win seven Oscars for nothing. A glowing Greer Garson (Best Actress) commands the screen as Mrs. Miniver, a middle-class British housewife whose strength holds her family together as World War II literally hits their home. Walter Pidgeon as her architect husband seems to be the prototype for future TV dads in this affecting portrait of love--familial and romantic--during war. But the relationship between Mrs. Miniver's college-age son (Richard Ney) and the upper-crust Carol (Best Supporting Actress Teresa Wright) is filled with inherent drama--as the war speeds up their young love, it also has the potential to doom it. The 1942 film, which also won for Best Picture and Best Director, is filled with colorful characters, snappy dialogue, and sensational plot twists. Although... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Greer Garson - Walter Pidgeon - Teresa Wright Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 03 February 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Winner of seven Academy Awards, including best picture, director, actor, and screenplay, William Wyler's brilliant drama about domestic life after World War II remains one of the all-time classics of American cinema. Inspired by a pictorial article about returning soldiers in Life magazine, the story focuses on three war veterans (Fredric March, Dana Andrews, and Harold Russell in unforgettable roles) and their rocky readjustment to civilian life in their Midwestern town of Boone City. Capturing the contradictory moods of America in the mid to late 1940s, this three-hour drama spans a complex range of honest emotions, from joyous celebration and happy reunion to deep-rooted ambivalence and reassessment of personal priorities. A movie milestone when released in 1946, The Best... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Fredric March - Dana Andrews Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 05 July 2000 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Ranking No. 21 on the American Film Institute's list of the 100 greatest American films, this 1940 classic is a bit dated in its noble sentimentality, but it remains a luminous example of Hollywood classicism from the peerless director of mythic Americana, John Ford. Adapted by Nunnally Johnson from John Steinbeck's classic novel, the film tells a simple story about Oklahoma farmers leaving the depression-era dustbowl for the promised land of California, but it's the story's emotional resonance and theme of human perseverance that makes the movie so richly and timelessly rewarding. It's all about the humble Joad family's cross-country trek to escape the economic devastation of their ruined farmland, beginning when Tom Joad (Henry Fonda) returns from a four-year prison term to discover... More Info about this DVD Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 April 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Elia Kazan directed this sometimes powerful study of anti-Semitism in nicer circles, based on Laura Z. Hobson's post-World War II novel. Gregory Peck is a hotshot magazine writer who has been blind to the problem; to ferret it out, he passes himself off as Jewish and watches the WASPs squirm. Seen a half-century later, the attitudes seem quaint and dated: Could it really have been like this? Yet the truth of the story comes through, in the wounded dignity of John Garfield, the upright indignation of Peck, and the hidden ways bigotry and hatred can poison relationships. That's particularly true in the Oscar-winning performance of Celeste Holm, who finds more layers than you'd expect in what seems like a stock character. --Marshall FineMore Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gregory Peck - Dorothy McGuire - John Garfield Director(s): Elia Kazan DVD Release Date: Released the 14 January 2003 Usually ships in 24 hours
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The most famous and sublime treatment of the gunfight at the O.K. Corral, John Ford's My Darling Clementine is by any measure one of the most classically perfect Westerns ever made. Henry Fonda plays a hard, serious Wyatt Earp leading a cattle drive west with his brothers when a stopover in the wild town of Tombstone ends in the murder of his youngest brother. Wyatt takes up the badge he had turned down earlier and tames the wide-open town with his brothers (Ward Bond and Tim Holt), all the while waiting for the wild Clantons (led by Walter Brennan's ruthless Old Man Clanton) to make a mistake. Victor Mature delivers perhaps his finest performance as the tubercular gambler Doc Holliday, an alcoholic Eastern doctor escaping civilization in the Wild West. Ford takes great liberties... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Henry Fonda - Linda Darnell Director(s): John Ford DVD Release Date: Released the 06 January 2004 Usually ships in 24 hours
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