How Green Was My Valley The Movie in Cape Cod, MA

• Info
• Cast & Crew

• Genre: Drama
  
  Synopsis:
  Five Oscars went to John Ford's adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's novel chronicling the life of a Welsh mining family.
  
  Release Date: 12/27/1941
  Running Time: 118
  
  
• Cast:
  Mr. Gruffydd, Village Preacher: Walter Pidgeon,Angharad Morgan, Eldest Daughter: Maureen O'Hara,Huw Morgan, Youngest Son: Roddy McDowall,Mr. Gwilym Morgan: Donald Crisp,Bronwyn Morgan, Ivor's Wife: Anna Lee,Ianto Morgan: John Loder,Mrs. Beth Morgan: Sara Allgood,Cyfartha, Dai Bando's Partner: Barry Fitzgerald,Ivor Morgan: Patric Knowles,Dai Bondo, ex-boxer: Rhys Williams
  
  Crew:
  Director: John Ford,Producer: Darryl F. Zanuck,Writer (Screenplay): Philip Dunne,Cinematographer: Arthur Miller,Music: Alfred Newman,Film Editor: James Clark B.,Art Direction: Richard Day,Art Direction: Nathan Juran,Makeup: Guy Pierce,Set Decoration: Thomas Little,Costume Designer: Gwen Wakeling,Sound: Eugene Grossman,Sound: Roger Heman
  
  Production Companies:
  Twentieth Century Fox
  
  Distributors:
  20th Century Fox
  
  Notes:
  Production Notes -Notes provided by Twentieth Century Fox- A Fence Around Time By Philip Dunne I. Genesis Where does a movie begin? At what precise point can we discern its newly fertilized egg, its Big Bang, its Genesis? The critic of Time magazine thought he knew how and when How Green Was My Valley came into being. "Director John Ford," he wrote in his unsigned 1941 review, "has chosen the book's method to tell his story: his reminiscing Welshman is an offscreen voice, introducing and commenting on the picture's episodes." Except for the cast, nobody else connected with the production is mentioned in his 700-word review. Since the critic admits that in the Beginning was a Word, Richard Llewellyn's novel, this is not pure Auteur Theory, which holds that the movie springs full-armed-like Pallas Athena from the brow of Zeus-out of the cerebrum of its director, but it will take nothing away from my cherished friend Jack Ford's brilliant direction and his well-deserved Academy Award to say that the review, like so many others, gives a completely false impression of the movie's conception. Then can we pinpoint the fertilization of the egg sometime before that, when producer Darryl F. Zanuck and I had our first conference, and incidentally decided to tell "our" story in the book's reminiscent flashback? (We called the technique "narratage." I had bean impressed by it when Preston Sturges and I were both working for Jesse Lasky at the old Fox studio in 1933, and Preston used it in his innovative The Power and the Glory. It was also used in Sacha Guintry's 1936 Le Roman d'un Tricheur and over Stanley's march in our Stanley and Livingstone in 1939). But it wasn't producer Zanuck's story, or mine. It was Richard Llewellyn's story, and the movie in truth was born when he sat down to write: "I am going to pack my two shirts with my other socks and my best suit in the little blue cloth my mother used to tie around her hair when she did the house, and I am going from the Valley." Those words, with which he opened his novel, slightly modified in my screenplay and spoken by narrator Irving Pichel over shots of the ruined valley, also opened the finished movie. But there may have been an even earlier beginning. In 1961, when I was directing a picture in Wales, I was told that Llewellyn's haunting novel had been inspired by the diary of his father, who was himself perhaps the prototype of the novel's Huw Morgan. I had met Llewellyn in London, and always intended to ask about this, but never saw him again. However he came by the idea, How Green Was My Valley began not with any individual or group at Twentieth Century Fox, but with the descendant of Welsh coal. miners who wrote it. The movie made from his book, on the other hand, was the product of many minds, of many creative and technical skills. In sequence there were Hollywood's ablest producer of the period, not one but two world-famous directors, a glittering cast of actors, and the cameraman, composer, art director, film editor, and all the other talented artists and technicians who made major contributions to the finished picture. Like all movies, it was, Auteur theorist critics to the contrary notwithstanding, an intricate and elaborate collaboration. Parenthetically, I don't want to give the impression that I am prejudiced against critics, even though as both writer and director I have often been the target for their slings and arrows. Bosley Crowther of the New York Times, for instance, called How Green Was My Valley a "stunning pictorial masterpiece," but the only adjective he could find for my screenplay was "inadequate." He was certainly right on the first count, and possibly on the second as well. The screenplay followed the book in being quite frankly episodic; there was no other way to dramatize Llewellyn's many interwoven stories, stretched out over many years. No, I don't dislike critics, but I detest some of the things they do. For instance, in analyzing a movie, some of them seem to feel compelled to sort out sheep from goats, to assign credit here and dish out blame there, whereas the truth is that in our collaborative art it is nearly always impossible, even for the actual participants, to decide which of us did or failed to do what. More often than not, the sacrificial goat turns out to be the writer. For instance, my esteemed colleague, the late Mary McCall, Jr. (whose daughter happens to be a highly respected critic), wrote the Maisie series at MGM starring Ann Sothern. Mary used to carry in her purse a review by a prominent critic which mercilessly panned one of her screenplays, adding that the picture was saved only by the witty things Ann Sothern said. When I was directing a movie at Universal, a veteran writer used to drop by my set to air his miseries. His latest script had fallen into the clutches of a darling of the critics, a young director who had skyrocketed to fame because of a competent job he had done in turning a hit play into a successful movie. Although he had merely photographed the play more or less intact, one critic, a dedicated Auteur theorist, had compared him to Fellini, Truffaut and Wyler, if not Jesus Christ. According to my friend, the director had taken his press notices to heart and began to consider himself an author. Apparently, he and the star of the picture, who also harbored literary aspirations, were disemboweling his script on the set and turning into a Grade B soap opera. The picture opened to unanimously bad notices, but the worshipful critic rose to the challenge by telling his readers that this time the brilliant young director had been betrayed by "his" writer. Auteurs, it appears, are responsible for their hits, but not their flops. Strangely enough, my friend the writer was less incensed by being; blamed for the movie's failure than by that little possessive pronoun. "Good, bad, or indifferent," he growled, "I'm my own goddam writer." In our collaborative craft, it is almost impossible to tell who provides the quantum jump which guarantees a movie's success. Julien Josephson and I share credit for writing Stanley and Livingstone. We had been asked to rewrite a very bad script and had no idea what to do with it when someone at the studio-I have been told it was the executive William Drake-sent Zanuck a brief memo which completely transformed the story. On Luck of the Irish, the director, Henry Koster, was the hero. We were ready to go into production with what was, to me at least, a dubious script, when he made the saving suggestion. We were able to talk a somewhat reluctant Zanuck into delaying production for several weeks while I rewrote the script. Sometimes one little scene, one piece of business, will turn a :routine movie into an event in cinema history: James Cagney shoving half a grapefruit into Mae Clark's face in Public Enemy; Richard Widmark pushing an old lady in a wheelchair down the stairs in Kiss of Death; the people who live near a railroad track having to interrupt conversation every time a train shakes their house on its foundation in A Letter to Three Wives. (As a matter of fact, I may have given writer-director Joe Mankiewicz the idea for that. During my government service during World War II, my wife and I lived in a tiny apartment some thirty feet removed from New York's Third Avenue elevated tracks. When trains rumbled past, our sometimes distinguished guests-James Thurber, John Hersey, John Ford-were forced into suspended animation.) Certainly Jack Ford put his mark on How Green Was My Valley. His prints are all over it, it is shot in his inimitable style, and he contributed at least one of the touches that made the picture memorable: in the final sequence having Huw sing his father's name as he searches for him in the flooded mine. But to call it "his" picture to the exclusion of everyone else, as Time's critic did, is to do a grave injustice to all the other contributors, in particular to Darryl Zanuck, who staked his reputation and perhaps his professional future on the picture's value, when all others had lost faith in it. To gain full understanding of how the movie was made, and in particular how two justly famous directors came to be involved in it, we have to recreate in our minds the great film factories of mid-century, in particular what was often referred to as "the writers' studio," Darryl Zanuck's Twentieth Century Fox. II. Assembly Line In these days when Hollywood studios are run by lawyers and accountants, with the actual movie-makers in effect camping on the premises only during the period of actual production, it is hard to project the imagination back fifty years and visualize a sort of film factory which turned out thirty or forty movies a year, with the movie-makers mostly on long-term contracts, working under the supervision of an iron-willed boss. Even more difficult is the notion of a virtual assembly line, with writers writing, directors directing, cutters cutting, with the director discouraged from participating in the writing process, the writer from visiting the set, both of them from the final editing stage, and one individual the sole and final arbiter at every stage of production. Yet that is how the boy from Wahoo, Nebraska, Darryl :F. Zanuck, ran his creation, Twentieth Century Fox. I can best describe it as a strict but benevolent imperium, with Zanuck, no Caligula or Nero, its all-powerful Augustus. It would be a perfectly legitimate question to ask how a system which deprived the writer of participating in the realization (as the French say) of his or her own script could be described as "the writers' studio." Nunnally Johnson, perhaps the most respected of all screenwriters (and an excellent director in his own right) supplied the best answer when he wrote that at Twentieth for a director to tamper with a script once approved by Zanuck was to insult American womanhood and trample on the flag. I had this forcibly brought home to me when I took to directing and changed a line of dialogue in my own script. Darryl came down on me like a ton of bricks. "Goddamn it," he said, "for twenty years I've been protecting you from other directors, and now you force me to protect you from yourself." (I had made the change at the request of the star. When he next approached me with a "Phil, I've been thinking," I said quickly to my assistant, "Put this man in for a stunt check." If actors would like to live dangerously, let them take up wing-walking or window-walking, but nothing so perilous as rewriting dialogue.) Nunnally has also been quoted as saying that the principal function of a director is to keep its actors from going home before six, but later amended this to explain that he was thinking of one particular director. But he did write of the director as seen by Auteur theorists: "He has all the qualities necessary for cultism ...his powers are ghostly and not subject to worldly analysis, and his magic is visible only to his initiates. Religions have been started on far less." He also wrote that Zanuck looked on directors as "glorified mechanics." I never heard Darryl say anything like that, but he did tell me that as long as he had a good script he didn't care much who directed it, though there were a few butchers he would rule out. Even that I can't accept as accurately reflecting his views. His attitude towards directors was much more ambivalent. He afforded them every courtesy, though there were a few notorious tyrants on the set he would lash with the tongue of an angry Marine drill sergeant in his office. Like all born executives, he was a keen judge of character, and knew that bullies usually can be bullied, nor was he averse to pushing over those intended by nature to be pushovers. In the "writers' studio," director credits in advertising and publicity matched in prominence his own as producer, while, before the Screen Writers Guild at last won a correction, a magnifying glass was needed to discern the name of the writer. Darryl's problem, I think, was that to some extent he swallowed the myth (as I did) that directors were endowed with some if Nunnally Johnson's ghostly powers. Directing was something he had never tried, and possibly feared he couldn't bring. off. Then, his imperium was the entire lot with all its multiple departments, but every director enjoyed, within this imperium, a little satrapy of his own. On the set, the director is an absolute monarch, though sometimes a ranking star can put a dent in his crown. Even the cans which rush the exposed film to the laboratories are stenciled with his name. Orson Welles called a movie set the biggest electric train a boy ever had to play with-and so it is. I can never forget the feeling of walking on a set for the first time as director, and facing several hundred men and women waiting for me to tell them what to do. It was both frightening and exhilarating, like my first solo in a plane. It was a taste of Power. No wonder that a director begins to think of himself as the prime creator if the movie, and no wonder that the Auteurist critic, visiting the set and never meeting the writer or producer, might become dazzled by the aura of power that surrounds the director. Even those little possessive pronouns play a part. My friend who objected to being called "his" writer, meaning the director's writer, was angry because the pronoun implied subordination, but the first time a lovely star introduced me to a set visitor as "our director," I inflated like Aesop's frog. Darryl has no established place on the set, no function to perform, no chair with his name on it. He was in effect merely the guest of the director, just another tourist tripping over cables and getting in the way of the busy professionals. And that, I believe, is why he rarely visited live sets (and why I as a writer preferred to avoid them). His command post was that long, long office, painted "Zanuck Green" and adorned with trophies of African hunts, or his luxurious projection room directly below it. There the minor satraps, the directors, had to come to him. In spite of his remark implying that he considered the director relatively unimportant, Darryl cast his directors with the greatest of care. On The Rains Game, he decided that no suitable candidate was available on the lot, though several leading contract directors were itching for the assignment, and borrowed Clarence Brown from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. He told me that he wanted Clarence, Garbo's principal director, to help Myrna Loy (also borrowed from Metro) make the abrupt transition from All-American girls such as her Nora Charles in The Thin Man to our decadent and promiscuous Lady Esketh. Not that she needed any help; she took to the naughty lady like a duck to water. Such switches were nothing new to Myrna, a superb actress, born in Helena, Montana, who had served her Hollywood apprenticeship typecast as a sultry Eurasian. On How Green Was My Valley, Darryl's first choice was also off the lot: he borrowed the rising directorial star William Wyler from Sam Goldwyn. And that is how not one but two world-famous directors, Wyler and Ford, came to participate in the production. Wyler's contribution, though significant, was limited to the pre-production phase: casting, building of sets and, most important, to the final screenplay. He was the beneficiary of a waiver, granted to a few favored individuals, from Zanuck's policy of excluding directors from the writing phase. Like the creatures in Orwell's Animal Farm, some directors were more equal than others. Of those I worked with, Clarence Brown, Henry King and Ford himself were the other principal beneficiaries of the waiver. But even where the favored few were concerned, the writing process was assumed to be complete before they were assigned. They were allowed to suggest changes, not make them. Writers at Twentieth never wrote "for" directors, as most critics and movie historians assume; they wrote for Darryl Zanuck. Of the twenty-odd directors who shot screenplays which I wrote alone or in collaboration, I sat in story conferences with only a handful, and three I never even met (nor will I, since they have long since ascended to that big Sound Stage in the sky). In fact, the pictures they directed I have never seen, since I thoroughly disliked the assignments.. In my early assembly line days I did what I was told to do, and only in later years did I earn the privilege of turning down assignments. I should emphasize that in my opinion the Zanuck way was not the best way to make movies, though it's hard to quarrel with his track record. In the twenty years that he reigned supreme over Twentieth Century Fox, "the writers' studio" won five Academy Awards for directors, one-fourth of the total awarded, and this against the competition of six other major studios, not to mention such formidable independents as Samuel Goldwyn and David O. Selznick. It worked for Zanuck-and failed miserably when he was succeeded by incompetents. It was then that what we never realized was a Golden Age came to an abrupt end. At a February 1981 dinner at the University of Southern California's Town and Gown Society posthumously honoring Darryl Zanuck which I chaired, Roddy McDowall pronounced the old studio's epitaph: "It was the happiest place to make movies in all the world." III. Screenplay In emphasizing the importance of the screenplay, I should draw a vital distinction. I have never claimed what some writers inevitably claim, that the writer as an individual is more important than the director-though in some cases this may be true-but that the writing of any movie, including the contributions of the producer, the director, and your Aunt Sally, is more important than the staging thereof. No director can make a good movie out of a bad script, though there have been many occasions when a bad director has butchered a good one, usually by rewriting it. Of course, nothing I have to say here pertains to those writer-directors who can make a valid claim to authorship, a Chaplin, a Bergman, a Sturges, or their modern equivalents. But some critics and historians fail to draw distinctions; they make every director an Auteur, as does the pernicious credit, "A Film By," which implies sole authorship. When I wrote, produced and directed The View from Popey's Head, the only author I could discern was Hamilton Basso, who wrote the novel. At times in the past, I have been overcome by partisan passion to the extent of comparing the relationship of director to script to that of orchestra conductor to composition. That is, as Mozart's G minor Symphony as conducted by Bernstein or Ozawa would sound much the same to a layman, if not to a musician, so our movie would have looked much the same if it had been directed by Wyler instead of Ford. I believe now that the analogy is false because it disregards the visual impact of what the director does, his tempos, moods, and choice of camera angles, and the types of performance he elicits from the actors. Parenthetically, I have always believed that there is as great a similarity between a movie and a musical composition as there is between a movie and a play. The variety, in mood and tempo that can be created by lighting, effects and background music is far more significant on the screen than it can ever be on the stage, though some modern theater productions, such as Nicholas Nickleby, Les Miserables and Sweeney Todd, have gone in for quasi-cinematic techniques. A more acceptable analogy of screenplay to finished picture would be that of architect's blueprints to finished house. The entire house is forecast in the blueprints, its shape and structure in minute detail, but not the painting, the landscaping, the furnishing and to some extent the choice of materials which give the complete house its own distinctive style. If style is the director's most obvious contribution-and it certainly would be in two directors as stylistically different as Wyler and Ford-that does not imply that the writer too doesn't impose his style on the finished structure. And this brings us directly to the function of the screenwriter, so often adapting the work of another writer that the style he (or she always being understood) imposes may not be entirely his (or her) own. When I have talked with students at universities around the country, I have always emphasized two points: first, that character is far more important than plot, there being no new plots, but as many characters as there have been individuals since the first australopithecine decided that he (or she) preferred two feet to four; second, that in adapting a novel or play to the screen, the writer should make every effort to retain the original author's intent and style. (Of course, if the original author is the screenwriter himself, so much the better.) I broke this second rule only once: Ring Lardner, Jr. and I considered the novel Forever Amber to be ludicrous, and by great effort succeeded in making it merely irrelevant. My screenplay of How Green Was My Valley contains very little dialogue that is mine, most of it in the love scenes between Angharad and Gruffydd. The style is clearly that of Richard Llewellyn, not my own. Yet in 1976, U.S. public television played a BBC mini-series of the same book which differs from my version as night from day. One critic, who apparently hadn't liked our movie (or perhaps hadn't seen it) remarked that the BBC production for the first time captured the style and essence of the novel-which was precisely what I had tried very hard to do. How to explain such an anomaly? One explanation could be that it was a question of differing emphases: that I had emphasized aspects of the novel that the BBC adapters had not-and vice versa. However you explain it, one point stands out: that the difference between two adaptations of the same novel will always be infinitely greater than the difference between what two directors might do with the same screenplay. Precisely therein lies the importance of the screenwriter's contribution, even when he merely adapts another writer's original work. This is particularly true when a long novel such as How Green Was My Valley must be compressed into two hours or so of time on the screen. It is the screenplay, not the direction, which establishes the shape and structure of the movie, and also its dramatic essence. For instance, seventeen years later, when I adapted John O'Hara's Ten North Frederick for my own direction, I based my screenplay on about forty pages of a four hundred-page novel. Moreover, because censorship of the time forbade abortions, an abortion being an important story point, to get around this difficulty I was forced to write a series of original scenes in what I hoped was O'Hara's style-and he had an exquisite ear for language as it is spoken in the social circles he liked to write about. It was with some trepidation that I sent him the final screenplay-he was a close personal friend-but he approved it with a few minor suggestions, and years later in an interview, also approved the finished movie, adding that he had walked out on both Butterfield Eight and From the Terrace, both also adapted from his novels. In 1949, I had a completely different problem with David and Bathsheba: how to flesh out the bare skeleton of a story told in the Second Book of Samuel, and do it with characters and dialogue which retained the flavor of the Old Testament, yet modernized, without indulgence in DeMillish vulgarisms and anachronisms. It is a condition of the craft that stylistically a screenwriter must be something of a chameleon. I was not Richard Llewellyn or John O'Hara, nor could I hope to be the elegant scholars of the King James Version, but I had to sound like a reasonable facsimile of all. (However, cinematic historian Tom Stempel, in his excellent book about Nunnally Johnson, Screenwriter, did after a fashion credit me with idiosyncrasy of style by referring to my screenplays as "relentlessly literate.") My introduction to How Green Was My Valley came early in 1940, and provides a perfect example of how two experienced screenwriters could take entirely different approaches to adapting the same book. Zanuck sent me a complete screenplay by one of the deans of his writing staff, Ernest Pascal. My heart sank when I saw Pascal's name because I knew that I was being forced into the position of criticizing a fellow-writer's work, and he was not only a colleague but a friend and ally: we were both. officers of the old Screen Writers Guild (he had recently been its president), which was then engaged in a bitter struggle for recognition by the studios, with Zanuck himself in violent opposition to the very idea of a writers' union, which he saw as a threat to his absolute authority. When I called Ernie to tell him that I had his script he told me that I should say about it exactly what I thought, that it had had a poor reception in that long green office, and that he was sick of the whole project: I humbly thanked him, read the script, and told Zanuck that while it was beautifully written I found it so gloomy and depressing that I wondered what had prompted him to buy the rights to the novel in the first place. Zanuck's reply, characteristically succinct and. to the point, was to send me a copy of the book, without comment. I started to read the novel right after breakfast the next day, and stopped only when my wife took it from me by force and violence at midnight. I finished it the following day and spent another day writing a long memorandum to Zanuck, not only accepting the assignment but outlining how I thought the subject should be approached. (Zanuck never used the telephone; we communicated almost entirely by memo. When I would send him a memo, he would send it back with :his reply typed on it in red ink. Unfortunately, when early in 1942 I took a leave of absence in order to enter government war service for the duration, most of my pre-war correspondence was lost.) The gist of my memo was that I thought the Pascal script had emphasized the labor strife and the industrial ruin of the valley, while virtually ignoring the warm human comedy and tragedy which glowed on almost every page of the novel. I felt that the emphasis should be on the family, on the process of the boy Huw growing up and learning about life and love, as well as tragedy and death as he remembered it in old age. The struggle of the miners to organize, the blackening of the green valley and the growing unemployment would serve only as catalysts for the gradual but irreversible disintegration of the once happy, prosperous and closely-knit family. It was about this time that I discovered that there had been an even earlier script, this one by Liam O'Flaherty, original author of the novel The Informer. I read it, roping to find a few nuggets of wisdom in it, but in fact discovered that it was absolutely useless: one long revolutionary diatribe, with page-long speeches by presumably semi-literate miners. It must have driven Zanuck right up the wall. When Mel Gussow's authorized biography of Zanuck, Don't Say Yes Until I Finish Talking, was published in 1971, and Darryl sent me a warmly autographed copy, I was startled to discover that two months before I sent him my memo he had sent one to Pascal making almost exactly the same points. In other words, from the beginning we had shared exactly the same vision for the movie, and arrived at it independently of each other. It was therefore no wonder that he instructed me to go ahead and write the screenplay, omitting the customary step of first submitting a "treatment." But, also in the Gussow biography, Zanuck seriously misstated the case when he claimed that "we eliminated the most controversial element in the book, which was the labor and capital battle in connection to the strike." This is not only completely untrue, but in direct conflict with a statement he was making at the time, as reported to me by many happy scandal-mongers on the lot, that I had talked him "into making a goddam pro-labor picture." (This was absolute nonsense; nobody ever talked Darryl Zanuck into making anything he didn't want to make.) I suppose that all of us who rely on memory-and I don't exclude myself-will sometimes proclaim as fact something we fondly wish had been the case. So it must have been with Darryl. The fact is that, far from being eliminated, the "labor and capital battle" set off the most serious family quarrel, between the union-minded sons and the conservative father, which resulted in the boys actually leaving the house and rooming elsewhere. "Are we sheep?" cried Ianto, "to be herded and sheared by a handful of owners?" I resolved the dispute in my script by having the preacher Gruffydd, who had been a socialist firebrand in earlier scripts, act as a sort of umpire and render final judgment in the line: "First, have your union. You need it. Alone you are weak. Together you are strong. But remember that with strength goes responsibility-to others and to yourselves. For you cannot conquer injustice with more injustice-only with justice and with the help of God." This was the definitive political statement made in our movie. Darryl accepted it as a compromise, though it accurately expressed my own views. I also used the line to advance the story: it moved Angharad to say to Gruffydd, "Will we always be in your debt? Now you have made us a family again," thus triggering our most effective '.love scene. Yet, strangely enough, the line lent credence to Zanuck's claim that: I had talked him into making a "goddam pro-labor picture." Innocuous as it may sound today, in 1941, when the picture was released, it was a daring and even radical statement. At that time, the very right to organize was a hot political issue. The great sit-down strikes were still vivid in memory, the beatings of union organizers by Henry Ford's goons, and the persecution of the Okies in California's San Joaquin Valley. And the supreme irony of all this was that pro-union statement was hammered out in civilized discussion by two men who were not only on opposite political slides, but in active personal confrontation, for Darryl was still adamantly opposed to the very idea of a writer's union, and I was vice-president of the union he opposed. I can't help thinking that if I had been Zanuck I wouldn't have been kicking myself for having made a pro-labor picture, nor congratulating myself for eliminating the issue, but rather taking credit for being the great producer he was, able to put aside his own prejudices and let the movie say what it had to say, just as he had done with the far more radical 1940 The Grapes of Wrath. When John Ford had begun to catch a lot of right-wing flak for having directed The Grapes of Wrath, he had wired me from New York asking me for an excuse for having made the picture. I had wired back two words: "The picture." The right-wing extremists were probably correct in picking on The Grapes of Wrath. To them, it was the more offensive of the pictures for two reasons: first, Tom Joad's poetic final speech, made by a man forced by "the system" into a radical underground; second, because in How Green Was My Valley, while we attacked mine-owners for their greed and came down hard on the side of the union, we also frowned on the violent tactics of union extremists in stoning Morgan's house and threatening his person, this leading to his wife's fiery defense and, if indirectly, to the crippling of Huw. We showed both sides, The Grapes of Wrath only one. In 1940, momentous events in Europe were directly affecting our movie. Zanuck, one of whose most endearing characteristics was his ability to inspire enthusiasm in his apostles, had projected for me a colossal How Green Was My Valley, which would have been our answer to the reigning colossus, Gone With the Win