How Green Was My Valley movie storyline. A compelling, classic, heart-wrenching drama of a Welsh coal-mining family over a fifty-year period, adapted from a story by Richard Llewellyn. Told in voice-over narration and flashback as intelligent and sensitive 10 year-old Huw Morgan (McDowall) nostalgically looks back on a bygone way of life. Huw is the youngest of seven children (six sons and one beautiful daughter Angharad (O’Hara)) in the Morgan family, led by elderly Mr. and Mrs. Morgan (Crisp and Allgood).
Tensions in the family grow at the beginning of the 20th century, during periods of labor unrest and workers’ strike. When stern Mr. Morgan resentfully refuses to join a miners’ union, calling it “socialist nonsense,” the family is split and the older brothers depart for a boarding house. Among other crises and losses that devastate the community, Angharad’s romantic love for the local preacher Mr. Gruffydd (Pidgeon) is ultimately thwarted. The film concludes with Huw’s understanding of the vanished old way of life.
How Green Was My Valley is a 1941 drama film directed by John Ford. The movie, based on the 1939 Richard Llewellyn novel of the same name, was produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and scripted by Philip Dunne. The movie features Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Anna Lee, Donald Crisp, and Roddy McDowall. It was nominated for ten Academy Awards, famously beating Citizen Kane for Best Picture along with winning Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Supporting Actor.
The movie tells of the Morgans, a hard-working Welsh mining family living in the heart of the South Wales Valleys during the 19th century. The story chronicles life in the South Wales coalfields, the loss of that way of life and its effects on the family. The fictional village in the movie is based on Gilfach Goch; Llewellyn spent many summers there visiting his grandfather, and it served as the inspiration for the novel. In 1990, the movie was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry of the Library of Congress as being “culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant”. The Academy Film Archive preserved How Green Was My Valley during 1998.
How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Directed by: John Ford
Starring: Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Anna Lee, Donald Crisp, Roddy McDowall, Sara Allgood, Barry Fitzgerald, Patric Knowles, Welsh Singers, Frederick Worlock, Richard Fraser, Ann E. Todd
Screenplay by: Philip Dunne
Cinematography by: Arthur C. Miller
Film Editing by: James B. Clark
Costume Design by: Gwen Wakeling
Set Decoration by: Thomas Little
Art Direction by: Richard Day, Nathan Juran
Music by: Alfred Newman
Distributed by: 20th Century Fox
Release Date: October 28, 1941
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