Failures in Time
It’s shocking that one could chalk up How Green Was My Valley as a for-hire piece for John Ford. The adaptation of Richard Llewyn’s 1939 novel was originally helmed by William Wyler—a fine dramatist, but no Ford—before Darryl Zanuck replaced him with one of 20th Century Fox’s star directors. It’s a perfect pick, as the tension between the land and the community (and the memory of each), cuts right at the heart of Ford’s central dynamic. A cynic might call into question of an auteurist reading of the film, given how closely it adheres to Philip Dunne’s script, which had already been completed before Ford joined the project. Yet for a Ford follower, it's undeniable how much his blood runs through the veins of the mountainside carved out by slag. The Welsh setting provides an ideal outlet for Ford’s Old World peasant romanticism; channeling the same nostalgia he has for the Ireland of his fantasies without being mired by the specificity. Instead, the Welsh town built on a hillside in California lives a life wholly its own.
We remember the valley through Huw, the youngest of the Morgan clan, played by “Master” (as he’s rightly credited) Roddy McDowall. They’re a mining family held up by the stern, conservative patriarch Gwilym (Donald Crisp), who often comes to clashes with Huw’s elder brothers as they try to adapt to the times. It’s the Victorian age, and a family that might as well have been in the Stone Age before coal came out of the hills now could live modest lives alongside the contemporary world, albeit still in poverty compared to the landed capitalists who run their lives. Wages are getting cut, and the boys suggest a union, which Gwilym resolutely strikes down as socialist talk. The boys are just as staunch as their father, and leave home—all except Huw, who’s much too young to have a say in the situation. “Yes, my son. I know you are there,” Gwilym tells a silent Huw at the now-empty dinner table.
The family unit that How Green is ostensibly nostalgic for only exists on screen in its most complete form for a handful of minutes at the start of the film. With its continuous dissolution as the driver for the film’s narrative, it calls into question whether the happy family, or the community on the hill ever existed as such a coherent entity at all, or if it can only be that in memory. Part of Ford’s magic is looping this back around by the end, transforming the bleak conclusion of the film into a nostalgic (if ghost-filled) montage of moments that make up Huw’s idealized memories. The film, then, in its constant motion, renders itself in much the same way in our own memories: when we look back, we believe there once was a complete idea of the “Morgan family,” even though we only experienced it briefly.
Last year, I wrote another column about How Green Was My Valley, focusing primarily on how Ford’s direction is that of a bygone industry. I attacked a tendency in contemporary image-making towards immediate clarity in everything in order to move through information as efficiently as possible. I see Ford’s work as a rejection of this, but I don’t want to infer that he doesn’t play into the recognizable. Ford enjoys using archetypes, even if just to subvert them, in order to give the audience a foothold for which they’ll eventually fall on. To get to his ineffable realm of poetry, he needs foundations—he’ll give us typical characters like the quiet and dreaming young boy, the rebellious sons, or the somber and serious father, and then linger with them to find the beauty in between.
Intellectual montage, the kind that Eisenstein’s multitudinous theories on editing often get reduced to, posits a pretty simple Image A + Image B = Image C heuristic for film grammar; i.e. that two images placed side-by-side can create a unique meaning together all their own. It’s the filmic form of Hegel’s synthesis, or Plato’s dialogues. It’s the heat that’s created from physical tension. Ford, while not approaching his cinema as angularly, is constantly playing within the tension of two impossible points. Instead of being linked through film editing, these foci are intertwined through the landscape itself. It’s what makes the town in How Green the great Ford metaphor: what it is built on also destroys it.
The mine’s the reason for the existence of the community in the first place, and the gorgeous green hills linger in memory, yet in life they’re corrupted by the slag, piling up over the decades until the place is a wasteland. So is the community, with its traditionalist parents and folk traditions birthing the new generations, yet they’re too stubborn and unmovable to join in the fight for their own survival. Instead, their sons leave for America as unprotected jobs get cut, and the soul of the community dissipates with everyone's growing distrust—trying to lay blame on each other for their destitution instead of rallying against the mine owner who’s enriching himself by keeping all of them in poverty. Self-destruction becomes the way to resolve the tension, the slow suicide of doing nothing.
Ford’s nostalgia is gutting because it’s two things at once: the reminiscence of the lives well-loved and therefore well-lived, with the simultaneous sadness in knowing that they weren’t what they wanted or even all that they could’ve been. In a sense, Ford’s films are about people who are failures, people who failed to integrate with society or keep with the times, outlaws that just couldn’t make it or soldiers that just couldn’t win. They can be hard people to watch because they stick to their guns when they don’t have to, or fight fights that aren’t worth the scars. But there’s something beautiful in their spirit, as foolish as it may be. They’re beautiful losers, the ones who go on living when there’s not much reason to as their dreams have all faded, but they still whirl away with the memories of what they left behind.