Word: huw
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There are no stars in the film, no one personality around whom the picture's structure is built. Instead, each of the individual performances--Walter Pidgeon as the town clergyman, Donald Crisp as the courageous head of the Morgan family, Maureen O'Hara as his daughter, Roddy McDowall as Huw Morgan, through whose words the story is told--forms a part of the broad pattern which the film so effectively presents...
...reminiscing Welshman's boyhood self (Huw Morgan) is played on the screen by a thirteen-year-old English boy named Roddy McDowall,* veteran of some 20 British films. His part-the wondrous day-by-day experiences that slowly make a boy a man-had to be played right to make the picture go. Thanks to his own considerable talent and the wise direction of John Ford...
...series of related episodes, How Green lacks the dramatic vigor of a unified story, but it has a kind of sustained theme in the relationship of Huw to his family. His innocent eyes watch his Godfearing, authoritarian father (Donald Crisp) turn a deaf ear to the rumblings of 19th-Century labor disputes; his honest, hardworking brothers forced by cheap labor to quit the mine and emigrate to the U.S.; his beauteous sister Angharad (Maureen O'Hara) marry the mine owner's son after the village cleric (Walter Pidgeon) stoically refuses to have her share his poverty; his good...
...breeding, breathing, aging and division that make up all family chronicles produce many a memorable sequence. The agony and embarrassment of Huw's first day at a national school is exaggerated to just the proportions that a boy would recall. The drubbing that Prizefighter Dai Bando (Rhys Williams) and his craven crony (Barry Fitzgerald) administer to Huw's priggish schoolteacher is a masterpiece of comic justice. The viciously pious bigotry that is determined to make something out of the innocent relationship of Angharad and her minister is stinging social satire...
...verbal splendor, its folksy lilt and whine, approaches literary affectation. Yet in this, his first published novel (he has destroyed five), he has developed a hypnotic ability to do precisely what he pleases. His Morgans, those they live among, the country they inhabit, every incident, every reflection Huw Morgan ventures on the whole matter, have an even radiance and euphony plus a rock-bottom tangibility. If it be only would-be great How Green Was My Valley is still uncommonly rich, able, moving...