How Green Was My Valley

John Ford wanted to make the film in Wales, where the story is set in a small mining town at the end of the 19th century, and in Technicolor, but a world war intervened along with a shortage of color film, so 20th Century Fox built an 80 acre replica of a Welsh village in the Santa Monica mountains and the movie was black & white.

The movie won the Academy Award for Best Film of 1941, beating out Citizen Kane and The Maltese Falcon.

For anyone who has viewed How Green Was My Valley, the striking images are unforgettable.

 

The most indelible image occurs near the end.  You can watch it in the video below, starting around 1:30.  After a disaster in the mine, see the lift emerge with the body of family patriarch Gwilym Morgan (Donald Crisp), cradled by his young son Huw (Roddy McDowell), both under the gaze of pastor Merddyn Gruffydd (Walter Pidgeon).  Staged with Christian symbolism and the adult Huw's narration, "Men like my father cannot die, they are with me still", it never fails to move me.