Ladies and Gentlemen, there exists a film based around a coal mine that doesn’t revolve around the workers ballet dancing, stripping, or playing in a brass band. The coal miners MINE. It's a pity, because those three films ( The Full Monty, Billy Elliot and Brassed Off ) are more enjoyable.

How Green was my Valley instead focuses on the Morgan family, and the disasters that happen to them. Usually, it would be appropriate to say that a film follows a family’s or character’s ups and downs, but in this case, almost everything that happens is negative, and the few happy moments come just before another catastrophe.

Valley is basically a soap opera, that encompasses fathers not getting on with their sons, husband and wife getting on despite their differences, forbidden love, losing jobs, cruel teachers, trying to shake off the dust of a one-horse valley, adolescence, death, divorce… But all these events happen separate from each other. For example, after one brother dies, his wife has his baby, and apart from a short speech about laying out his clothes, she does not mourn at all. Moreover, that scene is the only time I can remember seeing the child. Also, all the talk of unions and non-unions disappears, and there is no animosity between workers who hold their jobs and those who don’t, even if there was during a strike. Valley is episodic, and never feels like a complete film, more like a miniseries edited to two hours’ running time.

This lessens any emotional impact the film would have. Because the disasters seem in no way connected, we feel like we’re watching a slide show rather than a story. If the events did follow on from each other, this would be a heartwrenching film. As it stands, though, I was hardly moved.

It is not because the characters are unsympathetic that we don’t care for them. It is my opinion that there are too many characters, the number of brothers could easily have been cut, as we never get to really know any of them. But generally, we like the Morgan family, even if the mother is one of the more ignorant characters in film. Valley simply tries to do too much with all of them, and gives us the characters of the parents, Mr Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon in the film’s best performance), Angharad, and not many more. I am sure the book, by Richard Llewellyn is far more detailed in depicting the characters.

Moreover, there is no real character change throughout the entire movie. Huw at the end has gone through a great deal, but is the same person he was at the beginning. He is still soft-spoken, and ineffectual. Part of this comes from the fact that he only really has one scene to himself – when he asks his sister-in-law (the one who is supposedly heartbroken at the death of her husband) if he can move in with her. The rest of the time, he reacts, or he is present but does not do much, or feeds lines to other characters. His lack of development is best seen in that he refers at the beginning to the soot on his brothers and father as “the honourable badge of a coal miner”, and after doing very well at school, he still wants to be a miner, despite encouragement to become something like a lawyer or doctor.

Having criticised much of the film, I had better give the reasons for why I give it three stars. Pidgeon’s performance as Mr Gruffydd is the main reason. He plays one of the most sensible movie priests I have ever seen (up there with Father Karras of The Exorcist ). Gruffydd is not trapped in dogma, does not preach hellfire and damnation, and sees himself as a counsellor as well as a priest. We like him all the more in contrast to the other priest, and because Huw likes him, but the performance is the most natural-looking in the film. He also gets the best speech in the film, at the second Deacon’s meeting. I should point out that at the end, when he comes up on the mining lift, Ford has him positioned such that he resembles Christ on the cross.

Ford’s direction is also admirable. He shows restraint in trying to limit sentimentality, but does that too well, as I mentioned above. His best moment as director comes right after Angharad’s wedding. We see a figure silhouetted in the background. The actor doesn’t make melodramatic gestures, and Ford resists the urge to give us a close up showing the grief and pain on the character’s face. We don’t need anyone to hammer the point home; we know who it is, and how he feels.

Ford also manages to recreate a Welsh mining town brilliantly. The setting, even if the story doesn’t, feels real. We are told that music and singing are very important, and we begin to notice if the miners aren’t singing. It is obvious that Ford paid loving attention to detail in exactly how he wanted the town to look. He also works well with his cinematographer, Arthur Miller. He won an Academy Award, although the best cinematographer 1941 was definitely Gregg Toland for his breathtaking work in Citizen Kane . Ford does have faults in this film; he lets an opening narration go on far too long – it is at least fifteen minutes before anything actually happens; some dialogue sounds terribly stilted; the film occasionally descends into total melodrama; and his villains, such as schoolteacher Mr Jonas, and the older priest, are far too simplistically bad.

The film’s biggest flaw comes right at the end. The beginning narration gives away that there will be an unhappy ending, as does the title, depending how you read it (How GREEN… or How Green WAS… – they convey different meanings). But the ending is happy, and completely contrived. Rather than uplifting, it is confusing, especially after the series of depressing episodes. How Huw can be about to leave his home and yet decide that all the events in the film were somehow happy is beyond me. The only way I can make sense of it would be to assume that the years between the end of the film and when he leaves were truly horrific. They couldn’t have been much worse, as most of the family was already dead.


Recommended:
No