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How Green was My Valley Bittersweet Nostalgia
How Green Was My Valley centres on the relationship between the youngest son of a large family (played so sweetly by the child Roddy McDowell) and his father as their family life unfolds in a small coal mining town in Wales. It is introduced as a memoir by the son about his childhood. The world he describes has by now disappeared for ever and the story is partly a study of the causes of that demise. One could call it a parable but John Ford avoids defining a distinct moral view. The narration and sequencing is ordinary, mildly cheerful, almost banal but throughout Ford keeps up a consistent thematic tension. There is a foreboding in every act of how things will go: from bad to worse. James Stewart said about John Ford that he was not a chronicler of how things really were but how things should have been. This, I think, is true but he was always aware of the dark side. Yes, he had a clear idea of what an idyll might be but his dramatic vision was based entirely on placing it in contrast with the parallel presence of hostile, insidious forces working against the formation and maintenance of that very idyll. We meet the Morgan family, a family where the father and the elder brothers all work in the local coal mine. The coal mine, symbolised by a tall chimney spewing black smoke, sits atop a hill commanding over what was once a simple farming town with a church steeple and charming row houses. The coal mine dominates the economy as everyone who lives in the town comes to work there. The company which runs the mine remains faceless throughout and we never know how the heartless decisions about conditions and wages are being made. Gradually, working conditions worsen. Wages keep falling on the pretext that too much coal is being mined. Eventually a menacing quality comes over the life of the town as the workers become more shrill in their protests and divisions appear. The elder Morgan is an old fashioned gentleman who respects his employers but his ideal have become superseded. He stubbornly tries to maintain his ideals even at the cost of becoming estranged from his own sons. He'd rather let them go than accept that he might be wrong. He runs his house according to a clear set of rules about roles and behaviour. He is a staunch believer in order and his principles are right but he must learn that respect cuts both ways. Where there is exploitation the conventions of civility and order must end. However pig-headed he seems to be, Morgan is a a loving, tolerant man. Deep down he knows that life must go on even with all its troubles. There are many layers to this story and the most intriguing one is that of the unrequited love between the principled young preacher and Morgan's daughter played adroitly by Maureen O'Hara. There is real affection there and these two should get together but as society changes, even love is sacrificed in the belief that happiness can only be had if material well being can be guaranteed. This is the beginning of the middle class malaise of placing wealth and respectability before all else in life. We note that high divorce rates have now become a norm in all the 'industrialised' societies. How Green was My Valley is a curious merger of social realism and romantic drama. Right from the beginning there are hints of despair as signs of corruption and social decay emerge and yet throughout the travails, we are made to marvel at the resilience of age old values such as valour, honour, good manners and the strength of the human will toward beauty and harmony. There is real joy in how the characters act out of the signs of what we might call a happy communal life. John Ford likes to present the complete picture of good and bad but in all cases the language is clean and dramatic. The censors would not have allowed swearing in films in those days, so in the modern context, one could always call to question the degree of realism necessary in dealing with the harsh realities of life. But realism in art is problematic anyway for the way it gets confused between describing something and meaning something. Botticelli did not intend his allegories to look 'real' but the power of his symbolic suggestions are quite overwhelming. John Ford's films look more real than Botticelli but his imagery is constructed in a similarly painterly way. That is, we are reminded how fiction is about characters, and not necessarily about 'real' people. They are floating images on the screen that personify aspects of human character and as such they don't have to speak like real people do. They are bound inside a dramatic form that is there to create a representative idyll of humanity. If James Stewart's opinion was right about John Ford's rearview moral ideal, he must have had a very clear picture in his mind about preferable human behaviour. Perhaps if we look more closely at how he studied the past in its every detail, we might well see that he was actually showing us the way to make a better future. Rome, 20 September 2007
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The ecology has suddenly become a media event and everybody is worried about the state of our Mother Earth but who is really doing anything concrete about it? Energy consumption and the concomitant search for cheap fuel have been the primary preoccupation of business enterprises for centuries. Whole vocations were created only to be made redundant when new technologies took over. Generations have passed on since the Industrial Revolution changed the whole fabric of traditional societies. Even greed is no longer taboo but the signs of the growing force of pragmatism were already there more than a century ago. Compared to now these times seem quaint but capitalism was already very pervasive. Economics, hard labour, social harmony, family ties, honour, pride, exploitation, power; these are just some of the many challenging themes that are covered in a film that should be an epic but in effect it has the feel of a charming period piece. This understatement is typical of the mastery that John Ford had over the medium. While many directors and producers succumbed to the temptation of making the grandiose statement, often with small subject matters (think of David Lean with his Dr. Zhivago and T.E. Lawrence), John Ford is content to make small films and westerns that, paradoxically, deal with great classical themes that bind together all the generations of mankind.