Documentary News Letter (1942-1943)

DOCUMENTARY NEWS LETTER l-'EBRl ARY 1942 29 FILM OF THE MONTH Production: Darryl >rd. How Green Was My Valley is an awkward film to review. Most of the film is so good that it is difficult to understand why the rest should be so bad. The bad patches are the two main stories of the film. First — the valley was green, now it is dirty. The grass and trees are dirty, and the people are dirty. The second, the preacher who, although he loves the miner's daughter, won't have anything to do with her because he doesn't want her to live a life of poverty. Both these themes are so different to the main film that in the long run it is best to ignore them and take the majority of the film for what it is, a human and simple story of how a mining family and community lived fifty years ago. The first reel or so of the film's 10,600 ft. is straight commentary description of the valley. Then the people who have been silent come alive and start to unfold. At first they are very slow and it is with a lot of creaking and groaning that e of them manage to become real. When you are beginning to think that this is just another film of Hollywood Britain, you suddenly find yourself in the middle of one of the richest human films that you have ever seen. The family consists of father and four grownup sons — all miners who work in the same pit — mother, a daughter who has got an eye on the preacher, the youngest son aged about 10, and a daughter-in-law. How Green Was My Valley is certainly out of the ordinary as far as films are concerned — all the most extraordinary things that happen to people have been made by films into the most ordinary things — and to see ordinary things about ordinary people in an expensive Hollywood production is most extraordinary. Of course, the most surprising thing about the film is that it was made by an American in America. I should think it is about the most difficult job a director can do, to* make a film about another country and another people. It is obviously easy to make the old pot-boilers about Henry VIII or stories like that. But to make a film about a mining village in another country is obviously a pretty tough job. Say a film director is about forty and he is making reasonably good films about life in his own country — think of the amount of background that he has instinctively at his finger tips — in fact forty years of living with the people he is making films about. In England we have seen foreign directors come in by the dozen — some of them who had made class stuff in their own countries — but not one of them has made a film about Britain of the British which means anything at all. There is no particular continuity through the film. It is just incident after incident in a family and a village. How Green Was \h Valley is, 1 should think, the first real film about ordinary people that has come from Hollywood. Thai is a film of ordinary people living their ordinary lives. There is no epic trek across a continent — no battle against Fascist cops as in The Grapes of Wrath. No romantic boozing in the tropics— no fights over luscious dames or against bombers as in The Long Voyage Home. Nothing that happens in How Green Was My Valley is out of the ordinary — and most of the film is of nothing very dramatic. or anyway not dramatic in the accepted film sense. A typical sequence is the one where the four big brothers have their younger brother on the table and are massaging his temporarily paralysed legs. It is Sunday morning and all of them are cheerful — they work away good and hard and the boy lying on the table grunts as they work his legs backwards and forwards. Then his grown-up sister walks through the kitchen and says something to him — he resents being treated as a child in front of his brothers, and says, "You mustn't come in here when I haven't got my clothes on." His sister is on her way out, but quickly turns back as she sees a chance for some fun and says, "Oh! I mustn't, mustn't 1?" The brothers stand grinning and she suddenly whips the towel off him and gives him a terrific smack on the bottom. There is nothing much to that, but it is very pleasant when you see it. The wedding is very good, with the miners holding hands in two long chains and swinging their legs alternately in time to the song they are singing. The wedding party with beer flowing and Donald Crisp doing a most amazing trick in a drunken game. The boy starting school, his fights and beatings, and best of all, Dai Bando, the half blind boxer, giving the schoolmaster a lesson in boxing. There is a lot of rough stuff in the film. The long shots of the much publicised mining village set are atrocious. The mining cottage interiors are about the size of a football pitch. A lot of the acting is not of the best, but it always seems to be difficult for actors to play ordinary people, and there are always the two fake stories in the background. But the good stuff bears down all the faults and you remember with a great deal of pleasure How Green Was My Valley as a rich and human film of ordinary people. CORRESPONDENCE dear sir: A word about your review of one of our films Three in a Shell-hole. Wouldn't bother you except that it exemplifies a particular sort of drivelling thinking from which Dm i News Letter should be free. The film is dubbed. Your reviewer writes: ""The voices are affected, the wording pompous and the lip-synching inaccurate." That of course may be true. Or it may not. Different people may hold different opinions. Your reviewer is entitled to hold and write, and you to print, his own. But: "Anyway it is certain that this sort of dubbing on a realistic film is a failure." "Anyway", "Quite certain". "A failure". What on earth does this mean? I have made inquiries and I cannot find an instance of a single cinema showing of this film that did not grip its audience and evoke applause. The film was in fact astonishingly successful. More than one candid friend has told me how bad, not merely the dubbing but the idea of dubbing such a film was, of how its merit and essential character was thereby ruined, etc., and, on being asked how the film went over when they saw it, replied offhandedly, as though it were of trivial importance, "the audience seemed to like it." Yes. the audience liked it. The audience was moved by it. But the audience was wrong "Anyway, it is quite certain that it was a failure." Your reviewer may not like that "sort of dubbing'. Nor do I. But what has that got to do with it? His drivelling remark is an example of the dangerous tendency of bright young film-people to elevate (heir own standards into absolutes and ignore the crucial test for all art-communication, the art-object audience relation, the final criterion which exposes whether our own standards are as impeccable as we may think, or may not after all need re-examination. Yours faithfully. Knowle, Bucks Hill, ivor MONTAGUE near Kings Langley, Herts. sir : I am sorry you felt that the first letter I sent to you was too long for you to print sorry because it is difficult to compress into one quarter of the length all of the things about Documentary News Letter which I think need to be said. However, here's an attempt to do so : D.N.L. won my respect — and that of many others — because it campaigned for the recognition of the function of the film in total war; because it insisted that the place of the skilled film technician was behind a camera, not a machine gun ; because it spoke out for the good of the film industry without fear or favour. But D.N.L. loses my respect when it begins to discriminate unfairly between those who are within a small self-appointed coterie of "leaders of documentary" and those who are not. This discrimination is, I contend, obvious in D.N.L.'s treatment of the three principal sponsors of short films in the British Council, the Directorate of Army Kinematography, and the Ministry of Information Films Division. D.N.L. has condemned the British Council root and branch. Article after article (unsigned) has insisted that the British Council must go. that it is already on the departure platform. Your reasons? Its policy is out of date and remote from the realities of total war. Yel in your issue of March, 1941 (after 19 months of total war), a Shell Cinemagazine consisting of three items— the ancient craft of glass-blowing, old and new harvesting methods and the work of a village blacksmith -received from D.N.L. a warm review, ending with these words: 'The whole reel has a remoteness from the warstrained atmosphere of life to-day and should find favour with any type of audience." Would the British Council have received equally warm praise for films dealing with those three subjects.' And if it is right for Shell to make films with a welcome remoteness from warstrained atmosphere, why is it wrong for the British Council to do so? I think you will agree that a film like Realist's Out oj the Night, was well worth making. The British Council commissioned it. Then wh> not devote your energies to persuading them to commission more such worthwhile subjects? Then the D.A.K. D.N.L. makes no secret of its dislike for the Army outtit and hints darkl) that there ought to be an investigation. What (Continued on p. 30)