How Green Was My Valley

How Green Was My Valley

1941. USA. Directed by John Ford. With Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp, Roddy McDowall, Sara Allgood. Many Fox directors (Frank Borzage, Raoul Walsh, etc.) were heavily influenced by the experience of watching F. W. Murnau make Sunrise on the studio lot in 1927—none more so than John Ford. Murnau, perhaps even more than D. W. Griffith and Sergei Eisenstein, changed the direction of the cinema, and was responsible for Weimar’s most lasting influence. Although numerous Ford films (Four Sons, The Informer, The Prisoner of Shark Island) could be chosen to illustrate Murnau’s influence, How Green Was My Valley, probably Ford’s greatest non-Western, should serve nicely. 118 min.