How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Directed by John Ford
Huw Morgan, the academically inclined youngest son in a proud family of Welsh coal miners, witnesses the tumultuous events of his young life during a period of rapid social change. At the dawn of the 20th-century, a miners' strike divides the Morgans: the sons demand improvements, and the father doesn't want to rock the boat.
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What critics compared How Green Was My Valley to
Along with the black & white and a story of community, it’s obvious that Branagh’s inspiration are the films of John Ford, specifically How Green Was My Valley , a movie that is the pinnacle of movies about family.
We’ve been here before, as long ago as “How Green Was My Valley” (1941) and as recently as “Minari” (2020), with John Boorman’s London Blitz memoir “Hope and Glory” (1987) a particularly relevant midpoint.
It’s why the tear-jerking nonsense How Green Was My Valley trounced Citizen Kane at the Oscars in 1941.
Long revered as one of the greatest films ever made, Orson Welles' debut - a film à clef focused on tycoon Charles Foster Kane - was just another nominee back in the day, losing out to How Green Was My Valley.
Like all truly great films (“Tokyo Story,” “How Green Was My Valley,” “Saving Silverman,” et al.)
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He then made many more highly regarded films: Stagecoach (1939), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), The Grapes of Wrath (1940), How Green Was My Valley (1941), My Darling Clementine (1946), Fort Apache (1948), She Wore a Yellow Ribbon (1949) and Wagon Master (1950).
John Ford ("The Searchers"/"The Quiet Man"/The Horse Soldiers") directs the Welsh colliery film as if Wales were his Ireland.
Ford, despite being best known for his Westerns, never won an Oscar for even the best of those genre pieces (which included the likes of Stagecoach and The Searchers).