John Ford

Many moons ago I wrote to Clive James disagreeing with a review he had written of a TV version, with Stanley Baker if memory serves me well, of "How Green was my Valley". I told him I thought it wasn't a patch on the film version directed by John Ford. Wonder upon wonders, he wrote back saying he was not as great a fan of Ford as evidently I was. Today he has written in his TV column for the weekend Telegraph a piece about "Donovan's Reef": "How does a movie get quite as bad as Donovan's Reef? Directed by John Ford, this horrible mess was made in 1963, at just about the time that all the bright young film critics were trying to get Ford hailed as infallible. No doubt he was an efficient technician but his view of the world was like some endless recruiting commercial for the US cavalry." He doesn't like John Wayne either: "I always loathed John Wayne."
Well, I am not going to write a spirited defence of John Ford because there are only a few of his hundreds of films that I like - and, I have to agree with Clive James here, "Donovan's Reef" ain't one of them. But there's "The Searchers" and there's "The Man who shot Liberty Valence" and there's "The Grapes of Wrath" just for starters. Do you need to admire Ford for all he did when these marvellous ones are worth lauding his talents for. And there are great scenes in most of his films from the pit disaster in "How Green was my Valley" to "The Horse Soldiers" to "Sergeant Rutledge".
As for John Wayne - how can you loathe him with his smile and his drawl and the way he walks: he's not so much an actor as a physical presence on the big screen that you can't help admiring - unless you are Clive James.
In the same article he wrote appreciatively of "Billy Connolly's Route 66".... now there's a man worth loathing.

How Green was my Valley

I saw this film many, many years ago and thought it junk. It was, I thought, rather offensive to Welsh people like myself in that it depicted us as rather quaint, a bit foolish at times, foreign. When I saw it again many years later I liked it a lot. It had those magnificent scenes, characteristic of John Ford's Westerns: scenes that spread the action out of doors, scenes of great drama in court rooms - here in the chapel, scenes of brawls (mostly drunken) - here in the school yard. Then the scenes of the devastation down the mine when there is an explosion and the boy, Huw, goes down with the preacher, Mr Richards, to rescue Huw's father with, outside, the crowd of womenfolk and children waiting in anguish for their loved ones. "Kameradshaft" is supposed to be the greatest mining disaster film but its political message is too strong and contrived for me, and, cinematically, Ford's work is simply better.
This time I found it terribly sentimental in places and I found it difficult to place it in South Wales - not least, probably, because Ford had used a predominatly Irish cast (though most did their best to imitate Welsh accents); but it is a great film in that it's a film on a big scale with a big story and its full of life; it has the energy and drive of great stories which take in all aspects of humanity from the story of Huw's sister's love for the new preacher who cannot commit himself to the horridly real expulsion of a young woman from the chapel by the deacons for giving birth to an illegitimate child; from the birth of union activity to the emigration of two sons to America and other places looking for work.
I regard it as one of John Ford's "Irish Films" in that it wallows in sentiment that is a bit fake. When he was once asked about his films he replied "I just make Westerns". But like all expatriots (or those who like to think they are similar since they have family roots elsewhere) he saw Ireland through rose-tinted glasses: unreal, much loved but a sentimental love. His Westerns he saw them without the clutter of fanciful baggage.
There are some fine performances in the film: I think it is one of Walter Pigeon's finest performances and as for Donald Crisp, who won an oscar for it, one of his best and,surely, his funniest.