The New Pictures

How Green Was My Valley (20th Century-Fox) is Hollywood's answer to Wordsworth's definition of poetry: emotion recollected in tranquillity. Its story (from Richard Llewellyn's novel) is an aging man's remembrance of his boyhood among a lyric, godly race of coal miners in a green Welsh valley. Because his recollections ring true, they are certain to evoke a similar nostalgia in all but the most slab-sided of moviegoers.

How Green is almost a photographed novel, is very nearly a silent picture with occasional dialogue sequences. Director John Ford has chosen the book's method to tell his story: his reminiscing Welshman is an offscreen voice (Rhys Williams) introducing and commenting on the picture's episodes.* For the most part, the actors are silent as befits inarticulate people.

The camera moves over the brick, mortar and stone of the hilly Welsh village, wanders-up & down the pleasant countryside, down into a grim mine, pauses a moment on the black slag (waste of the coal pits) which will some day engulf the valley and drive the people out.

The 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, it is.

A 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 mother (Sara Allgood) bear the family disintegration with humility and courage.

The 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.

Song is as immediate among the Welsh "as sight is in the eye," and How Green is eloquent with melody. Music is beautifully supplied on & off the screen by 80 members of a Welsh choir discovered in Los Angeles. When these singers were moved into the picture's expensive Welsh village in the California hills, some of the elders thought it was supposed to be an exact replica of their home towns in Wales. They made no bones about complaining of inaccuracies in the buildings, of names on tombstones of people who had never lived in their town. According to Director Ford, one, whose brother is buried in Wales, found his name on a tombstone and went there each noon to mourn.

Although it is as dramatically incoherent as life itself, How Green is a radiant idyll of the dignity and charm of honest, simple working people. Well acted by a competent, unstarred cast, the picture is a credit to Director Ford, who is himself a big, rumpled, modest Celt (Irish) with a tidy mind, rock-ribbed integrity and a talent for turning out superb pictures (The Informer, Arrowsmith, Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach). It is also his last picture--for the present. He is now on active duty with the U.S. Navy.

Never Give a Sucker an Even Break (Universal) is not a movie; it is 70 minutes of photographed vaudeville by polypnosed W. C. Fields, assisted by Gloria Jean, Franklin Pangborn and other stage properties. As such, it is strong drink for cinemaddicts who believe that the Great Man can do no wrong, small beer for those who think that even a Fields picture should have a modicum of direction.

Sucker has no plot and needs none. It is just Fields trying to peddle a scenario to Esoteric Studios. He reads a scene, then plays it. Upshot: a maelstrom of slapstick, song, blackout. episodes, old gags, new gags, confusion. That much of it is truly comic is testimony to the fact that Comedian Fields is one of the funniest men on earth. Whether he is offering a cure for insomnia ("Get plenty of sleep"), refusing a bromo ("couldn't stand the noise"), nasally vocalizing ("chickens have pretty legs in Kansas"), meticulously blowing the head off an ice cream soda, Fields is a beautifully timed exhibit of mock pomposity, puzzled ineffectualness, subtle understatement and true-blue nonchalance.

Now 62, Fields has spent most of his adult life battling babies, dogs, censors, producers, directors, the world in general. From the shape of his latest picture, it is apparent that he has Universal licked. The only round Fields is known to have lost was the production's title: he wanted it called The Great Man. After the present title was selected, the comedian snarled: "What does it matter; they can't get that on a marquee. It will probably boil down to Fields--Sucker."

Recently Fields drew blood. Universal sent him a legal document threatening court action if he didn't mend his studio manners (i.e., references to company executives, language in front of cinemoppets, general demeanor). Back came a reply: "Dear Sir, Mr. Fields and I read your letter and did we laugh." It was signed "Adele" (Fields's Negro housemaid).

Largely as a result of such bickering, Sucker is far from being the kind of picture that only W. C. Fields could turn out. His unique talent needs intelligent direction. It does not need all the props that its owner thinks are a necessity for his performance. The great comedian can play straight better and more firmly than anyone in the business.

*A technique used in 1937 by French Writer and Actor Sacha Guitry in his cinema Le Roman d'un Tricheur (The Story of a Cheat).

* Now engaged in the spare-time activity of writing a history of Fidelis, a never-never-land which, he explains, "is a place of violence within reason."

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