HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY

It would be no exaggeration to call Ford’s multiple-Oscar winning saga of a struggling Welsh mining family one of the most emotionally resonant and genuinely moving films of the studio era. HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY is a triumph of expressive realism that gives emotional depth and dignity to those suffering social injustice, rendering vivid and authentic the difficult lives and plain pleasures of the coal miners and their families. In his first starring role, child actor Roddy MacDowell poignantly captures the awkward, fragile innocence of youth in his portrayal of a wide-eyed, precocious romantic pulled abruptly into adulthood when a contentious miners' strike fractures his family's unity.

“Ford was an enormously complex 20th century American artist whose films embody and transmit many different and sometimes contradictory aspects of the culture, and I expect they will always be debated. But if there are two core elements of his artistry that make him an essential figure, they are his dynamism, a direct creative response to the cinema itself near its very beginning as an art form, and his aching desire and formidable ability to incarnate and dramatize both the power and the fragility of human fellowship, how it can endure and how it can fray and come undone with rancor, intolerance and the sadness of aging and loss. These elements are embodied in every single frame of HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY.” - Kent Jones