Hindsight

Classic Kids or films your kids have to see before they are 13 or else!

Day ten:  How Green was my Valley

Caveat, probably best for kids 8-13

Had to get a John Ford film in my top 100.  This film is exquisite, hard to believe that this was shot on a built back lot in Hollywood.   The young Roddy McDonald is heartbreaking.  The cast is brilliant, Maureen O’Hara, Walter Pidgeon, and Anna lee…..I remember seeing this film late at night, around nine years old or so, and could not wait to talk about it with my mom the next morning.  I think I almost  woke her up, to discuss the story.  How this young boy watched his family survive through so many  burdens and unfortunate social situations. 

Themes: Mining, work/labor, death, loss, parents and family, Bullying, family

Questions: Why is the story told from the boy’s point of view?   What job(s) do the men and women in the boy’s life have?   What is the role of class? What is the role of religion? What is the role of family and tradition?


Here is a sampling of the narration, such poetry: There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday. In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green.