Welsh Watch: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Watched:  02/07/2026

Format:  Prime

Viewing:  First

Director:  John Ford

Pondering how many Maureen O'Hara movies I'd actually seen, I noted I'd never seen How Green Was My Valley (1941), a massive Academy Award winner than got Best Picture the year Citizen Kane was nominated.  It's funny as not much changes with the Academy - a deeply sentimental movie with some good social points and dripping with nostalgia beat out a technical and narrative achievement that trades weepy for chilling.  

Based on a popular 1939 novel, the movie retains the approach, like a memoir detailing the various incidents and threads that shape the decline of a mining community in Southern Wales presumably in the late 19th Century.  In addition to O'Hara as the sister in a family with five brothers, the movie's focal point and narrator is a very young Roddy McDowall, who slowly loses his innocence and idyllic youth.  We also have Walter Pidgeon as a pastor at the church, Donald Crisp as the father navigating the changes - sometimes well, sometimes less well.  And there's an army of people you'll recognize from The Quiet Man, part of Ford's company of players.  

The movie covers a lot of territory, focusing mainly on the disintegration of a community that's essentially a coal mining company town.  The honest work of the mine is slowly being threatened by cheaper labor, and what impact does that have when it's the only work?  The film delves briefly into the ethics of labor unions and the accusations of socialism - and, frankly, why that's a false narrative when livelihoods are at stake.*  

O'Hara's storyline is that she's the lovely but unmarried daughter of the family, who has eyes for the newly arrived minister, played by Pidgeon.  But eventually she's wooed by the mine owner's son.  

There's plenty, as well, about the influence, positive and negative of the church, and condemnation of the infamous British educational system that relied heavily on bullying through the 20th Century.  

It is, as they say, a lot.

Much to my surprise, this takes place in Wales and not Ireland.  I guess I saw "John Ford" and "Maureen O'Hara" and "green valley" and thought "Ireland", lo these many years.  And I was surprised to learn the movie was filmed in California and not Wales - a recreation of a Welsh town was built in a hillside, complete with a mine.  

And, at the time, white people still remembered they were the product of immigration and the desperate forces that led to the move to America.  It's hard not to believe that the movie didn't echo in the stories told over kitchen tables by grandparents and the longing for a lost time and place.  

Anyway, with issues of management squeezing the workers - breaking the social contract, with communities trying to slap scarlet letters on women, labor issues - man, everything old is new again. 

I will be honest - while I didn't dislike the film and felt it had good performances, etc...  it also wasn't my favorite movie.  The pacing is...  languorous.  And with so many threads, it can be hard to see it as a cohesive whole.  And, frankly, it feels like it ends with more questions than answers - I mean, Roddy McDowall's character is a teen when he moves into his dead brother's house with his brother's widow and child, intending to care for them.  What happens there?  What happens to O'Hara's character?

And I get that isn't the point, but it does just kind of... end.  

The highlight, to me, was the Mother going into a snowstorm to threaten the unionizing men of the mine that if they came for her husband, she'd take them out.  That was gold.

Anyhoo - finally checked that one off the list.  

*my own family was in mining and involved in labor unions two generations back if you're wondering where my sympathies lie