HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY | johnfordfilmcenter

How Green Was My Valley (1940)

BACKGROUND

William Wyler was originally hired to direct the adaptation the novel How Green Was My Valley to the screen but budget reductions and scheduling delays caused Zanuck to give the job to Ford who was much better suited for the project since his family closely resembled Morgan family at the center of the book. Zanuck’s original plan was to shoot the film on location in technicolor envisioning the film as Twentieth Century Fox’s answer to Gone With the Wind but the war made this approach impossible. How Green Was My Valley was nominated for ten Academy Awards winning five including Best Director, beating Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon for Best Picture. To this day Ford still holds the record for winning the most Best Director Oscars with a total of four.

How Green Was My Valley went as far as a Hollywood film has ever gone in making the case for socialism. This gives us a sense of where the country was at considering how conservative Zanuck and the board of Twentieth Century Fox were. It was Zanuck’s burning desire to out-do rival David O. Selznick’s civil war epic that drove him to harness into the popularity of left-leaning sentiments at the time all in the name of notoriety and prestige for himself. Although Ford focused more on family life than politics, this only helped the film engage a broader audience then could have been reached by a dry moralizing polemic.