How Green Was My Valley

How Green Was My Valley doesn’t start well.

With panoramic shots and narration describing the scenery, you’re bound to wonder why the film wasn’t shot in color. Then there’s the singing, which is also pretty jarring, and that still-present voice-over narration. You get used to these things though as the film unwinds, and by the halfway point you’re totally caught up in the film’s world of a late 18th century Welsh coal-mining family.

That’s not to say the film still doesn’t have problems. Second billed Maureen O’Hara disappears for a good chunk of the film’s second half, and young Roddy McDowall doesn’t visibly age. The first issue isn’t that much of a problem, as it serves the story well, showing the once teeming family slowly falling apart, but the McDowall problem is more serious.

Without any dates on screen, there’s no real sense of time. McDowall’s character is injured, recovers, goes to school, graduates, goes to work, etc… but McDowall still looks like the same boy at the film’s opening. Have one, five, or ten years passed? While it’s not clear exactly how director John Ford could have mitigated this problem, it’s a problem nonetheless.

But even without a clear sense of time, the film works, largely because it so creates such a rich, lived-in world for its characters. How Green Was My Valley is a film that stays with you, as a memory as rich as any of your own, its characters and locations feel real.

Though not as good as The Maltese Falcon or as impactful as Citizen Kane, it’s easy to see why How Green Was My Valley beat them for the 1941 Academy Award for Best Picture. Its story of working-class Welsh people struggling through difficult and changing times was especially resonant given that England was, at that time, enduring German air raids during World War II. While that shouldn’t have factored into the voting process, it’s understandable that it did.