From the Archives: ‘Silent’ technique bowls over New York reviewers

NEW YORK —  The life of New York reviewers is pleasant indeed when pictures like “How Green Was My Valley” come along. It’s a good thing, though, that they come seldom, because the supply of critical adjectives has limits somewhere, and because critics strain for eloquence to capture the quality of this extraordinary film. The strain would tell, eventually.

Absorbing power

No danger, of course. “How Green Was My Valley” has unique form and feeling, which no one could copy, even if he were to try. Of all its many qualities the most striking to New York spectators is the power it has to absorb, to draw one into the screen, so that the audience loses its feeling of separate identity and the end of the film comes as a definite wrench, with the spectator not knowing which is real, the world that has faded from the screen or the glaring Broadway lights outside the Rivoli Theater.

This is the sort of movie experience which critics have been missing since the silent days, and its return is not without significance, since the picture is largely a silent film. The eloquence of words is richly a part of it, but its memorable passages are composed out of the texture of stone and wood and sky, the light of dawn and sunset, and the dignity and beauty of the unadorned human countenance.

Words in this picture are functional; the narrator speaks only of what his eyes see, and the other characters talk only to speed the narrative. Therefore thoughts and feelings are received by the audience at first hand, not strained through the rhetoric of a studio “dialogician.”

Experiment works

This bold return to the fundamentals of movie technique makes the picture experimental in the best sense — not in the tricky sense of “narratage” several years ago or the more recent Wellesian pyrotechnics. The experiment is justified because the methods chosen fit the story to be told. And in accomplishing this, John Ford and Philip Dunne have contributed to the solution of one of the most difficult problems in movie storytelling.

Episodic films have always been the bane of critics because characters lose interest and conviction as they progress through the years, aging and aging and changing their clothes but remaining the same as when we first saw them. Here we bridge the gaps by seeing the long story through the eyes of the central character. We feel what the passing years meant to him, and we are shown what changed him and the valley which was so green to his enamored eye.

There is more, much more, to be said of this film, and there are those who can even find it in themselves to be critical in the face of the intense human experience involved in seeing it: the experience of knowing a family and living their lives.

Superlative cast

What a family and what lives! Donald Crisp and Sarah Allgood, John Loder, Maureen O’Hara and the boy Roddy McDowall — it would be unfair to single any one out, except to say that Mr. Crisp is not only at his finest but makes one proud to be a human being, while the boy is one of these rare people born to the camera.

As for John Ford, “How Green Was My Valley” is a crowning achievement, the most intensely real and believable of all his fine pictures. It is so because he was given freedom to experiment with camera and sound, and for this critics credit Darryl F. Zanuck. Two pictures in two years like this one and “The Grapes of Wrath” reveal Mr. Zanuck as one of the wisest of Hollywood’s policy-makers, if not the most farsighted of them all.

The experimental quality of this film and of the MGM short, “The Telltale Heart,” which has been privately shown in New York, give hope for a new birth of freedom for the screen.