John Ford’s film of Richard Llewellyn’s novel remembers a Welsh mining valley from a lifetime away, and it moved us even where it is visibly working to. The village is a set in California and the accents wander, but the singing and the faces are real.
John Ford’s film of Richard Llewellyn’s novel opens with a man packing to leave the Welsh valley he grew up in, and everything after that is his memory. Philip Dunne’s screenplay keeps the frame honest: this is childhood recalled by someone who left, so the hill is greener and the hymns louder than they can have been. We think it is as good as the warm reviews say. Two things count against it, and both are visible inside ten minutes. The valley was built in California, and almost nobody in it sounds Welsh.
Start with what Ford and his cinematographer get right, because it is most of the film. Arthur Charles Miller shoots in black and white with everything in focus at once, so the street of cottages climbs to the pithead in a single shot and the men coming home are a line of small figures growing larger. They sing as they walk. Alfred Newman builds his score on that men’s chorus, and the film keeps to one rule: when the valley is well the men are singing, and when it is not they are silent. The first time the line came up the hill with the hymn, we were moved before anything had happened. It is a trick, and we did not mind.
The house is the other thing Ford gets right. Gwilym Morgan (Donald Crisp) and his sons come in from the pit and drop their wages into the apron of Beth (Sara Allgood), who takes the coins without a word and hands back the spending money. Nobody speaks at table until the father does. Crisp plays Gwilym as a man who trusts God and the colliery owner in that order, and never makes him a fool for it. Allgood gets the best scene in the film, on a hillside at night, telling a meeting of strikers what she will do to any man who harms her husband. It is the one time the picture stops being gentle.
Roddy McDowall’s Huw watches all this from the corner of the frame, and the boy is good because he mostly watches. Maureen O’Hara’s Angharad is the person the camera keeps finding; Gwen Wakeling puts her in a pale dress among women in shawls and Sunday black, so you know where the film’s hopes are before anyone says so. Walter Pidgeon’s preacher, Gruffydd, is upright and kind and talks a good deal. The film loves him more than we did.
Now the village. It was built in California, and it looks like it: the slate is too clean, the hill is the wrong shape, and the sun is a Californian sun. Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald and Arthur Shields are Irish and sound it, and the rest of the cast settle on a general Celtic that belongs nowhere. If you need to believe you are in Wales, you will spend the first half hour arguing with the film. We stopped arguing because the faces and the singing won. Ford is not trying to document Wales. He is staging a memory of it, and the tidiness is part of that.
The other charge is sentiment, and it sticks. Dunne’s script has the brothers ask for a union and the father refuse, and for twenty minutes the film is as sharp about labour as The Grapes of Wrath was the year before. Then the sorrows begin to arrive, and Ford stages each one the same way: a doorway, a hymn, a held look, and Newman’s choir underneath. James B. Clark cuts the years together by dissolve, and the second half moves through them fast. We will not say what happens. We will say that the film asks for tears about every quarter of an hour in its second half, that we resented the asking, and that we paid up each time.
It is a U certificate and runs 118 minutes. Watch it with someone who has left a place and not gone back. They will know why the man in the first scene wraps his things in his mother’s shawl so carefully, and they will not want to talk about it afterwards.
