How Green Was My Valley
Screening on Film
Directed by John Ford.
With Roddy McDowall, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp, Walter Pidgeon.
US, 1941, 35mm, black & white, 118 min.
With Roddy McDowall, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp, Walter Pidgeon.
US, 1941, 35mm, black & white, 118 min.
There are a few movies which are impossible not to love. This multiple Academy Award winner (including Best Picture) is one of them, the delicate, warmhearted story of a tiny boy (McDowall) growing up in a tight family in a Welsh coal mining town. Slowly, all the good things disintegrate, in mining disasters, altercations between the boy’s conservative father (Crisp) and militant older brothers, and the marriage of the boy’s older sister (O’Hara) to a rich recluse. In elegiac flashback, the boy (now an adult) recalls: "How green was my valley then!") Sad, humane, unforgettable.
