A Film Canon

 

 

This adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's fictionalised autobiography retains all its sentimental realism, artfully combining romance with social commentary, and extrapolating a fusion of Christianity and Socialism from Isaiah 55: "Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread/and your labour for that which does not satisfy?" That said, the tone is ultimately contemplative, rather than apocalyptic, as if narrator Huw (Irving Pinchell, played by Roddy McDowell) were more haunted by the passage of time than by its specific impact upon his late nineteenth-century coal-mining valley. Hence the curiously abstract qualities of that valley's extremities - especially its daffodil-covered peak - which don't connote past time so much as the kind of exemption from time found in Goodbye, Mr. Chips' mountain scenes, and are only enhanced by the stunning realism of Thomas Little's set design. From this perspective, Ford's inability to shoot in Technicolour, as originally planned, inevitably detracts from the mythos of the film. That said, Arthur C. Miller's cinematography provides a certain compensation in its transformation of shadow and darkness into a sticky, clammy tactility, analogous to the slag that spreads over the valley - most poetically evident in the final mine collapse, in which anxious wives feel anonymous black bodies, and a blind man touches his way through the caverns in search of Huw's father (Walter Pidgeon). The resultant identification of black-and-white cinematography with visual impairment sits nicely with Huw's observation that "singing is in my people as sight is in the eye", since the translation of written into spoken narration explicates his position between the old ways, symbolised by direct, communal, Welsh song, and the new ones, symbolised by indirect, individuated, English speech; a bard-gossip embodying a nation's voice painfully breaking.