Movie Moments: #20

How Green Was My Valley (1941)



"There is no fence nor hedge around time that is gone. You can go back and have what you like of it, if you can remember. So I can close my eyes on my valley as it is today, and it is gone, and I see it as it was when I was a boy. Green it was, and possessed of the plenty of the Earth. In all Wales, there was none so beautiful. Everything I ever learned as a small boy came from my father and I never found anything he ever told me to be wrong or worthless. The simple lessons he taught me are as sharp and clear in my mind as if I had heard them only yesterday. In those days, the black slag, the waste of the coal pits, had only begun to cover the sides of our hill. Not yet enough to mar the countryside, nor blacken the beauty of our village, for the colliery had only begun to poke its skinny black fingers through the green."

-  Huw Morgan (Roddy McDowall)

Trivia:

The film was shot in California rather than in Wales, where it is set, because of the continuous Nazi bombing of Britain in World War 2. This also accounts for it having been filmed in black and white, the colour of the flowers in Southern California not matching those in Wales.