How Green Was My Valley (1941) on Netflix
Huw Morgan grows up in a South Wales mining family. A wage cut sets his father against his older brothers, while his sister Angharad falls for the preacher Mr. Gruffydd.
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Trailer
Plot summary
Huw Morgan is the youngest of Gwilym and Beth Morgan's children in a South Wales valley at the end of the Victorian era. His father and his brothers cut coal underground, and his sister Angharad looks after the house alongside their mother. Huw is taken with Bronwyn, the young woman engaged to his eldest brother Ivor, and at the wedding celebration Angharad meets the village's new preacher, Mr. Gruffydd, and the attraction is plain to both of them. Then the mine owner lowers the miners' wages and the men strike. Gwilym holds back from the strike to keep the peace, which turns his fellow miners and his older sons against him.
Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about How Green Was My Valley (1941)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won five, famously beating Citizen Kane, Sergeant York and The Maltese Falcon for Best Picture, while Ford won Best Director and Donald Crisp Best Supporting Actor.
- Fox wanted to shoot the movie in Wales in Technicolor, but it was impossible during World War II, so Ford had the studio build an 80-acre representation of a typical Welsh mining town at Brent's Crags in the Santa Monica Mountains near Malibu, California.
- Llewellyn claimed he had based the book on his own personal experiences, but this was found to be untrue after his death: he was English-born and spent little time in Wales, gathering his material from conversations with local mining families in Gilfach Goch.
- John Ford originally hired Rhys Williams, the film's Welsh dialect coach, to record the narration as Older Huw, then had it re-dubbed by Irving Pichel shortly before release, afraid audiences would recognize Williams' voice from his onscreen role as Dai Bando.
