Word: valleys
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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FORD'S LAST pre-war film shows the disintegration of a family and a way of life in coal-mining Wales. It also represents the passing of an art. In How Green Was My Valley a certain type of American film reached its height--only to end. Ford's most intense melodrama brought the art of Griffith to an indescribable climax. Ford made many great films after World War II, but they are less intimate in subject, broader in pacing and lighting...
...rapid montage of sentiment in How Green Was My Valley threatens society's solidity each moment that these sentiments create society. In one scene a Morgan boy leads other townsfolk in song. Singing scenes, like fight and dance scenes, in Ford show group activity in which each person's behavior is laid down by tradition. A fight scene in The Searchers (1956), for example, gives participants and spectators secure roles. The tension generated when one man picks up a stick of wood turns into warmth and humor when he sets it as a boundary marker. No such security comes from...
...Observer "comforts the afflicted and afflicts the comfortable." Afflicting the comfortable produces advertising cancellations as well as press-association awards; last year the paper lost $4,000 on a gross income of $51 ,000. It would be out of business if it were not subsidized by its owner, Boise Valley Broadcasters, which operates radio and television station KBOI...
Ford's images, then, are images of idealization. The past is redefined and perfected through his magnificent camerawork and lighting, and through his sense of formal structure and geometric harmony. The result is a combination of memory and myth. How Green Was My Valley and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance (1962) are theoretically flashbacks told by men whose experience has been filtered through the traps of time and been idealized in the nostalgic mind. On a large scale, however, Ford does not recreate the past through memory, but creates the memories themselves. The Sun Shines Bright and My Darling...
...with Will Rogers is Ford's best thirties film, boasting a magnificent steamboat race that remains one of the most hilarious and breath-taking sequences on film. The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is every bit as great and important as everyone says, as is How Green Was My Valley, Ford's most emotionally powerful film. My Darling Clementine (1946), shot in Monument Valley, pits Wyatt Earp and Doc Holiday against the Clantons in an OK Corral fight directed the way Earp told Ford it really happened. Wagonmaster (1950) is rarely seen and one of Ford's most personal Westerns...