Leaving Rosebud, Leaving the Valley: Vestiges of Childhood in Two Classic Films from 1941

When the American Film Institute (API) unveiled its list of the one hundred best films of the first one hundred years of filmmaking, Orson Welles' landmark film Citizen Kane, released in 1941, snared the top honor. This was no surprise. Citizen Kane, which tells of a newspaper reporter's quest to find the meaning of a dying man's last utterance and explores the myths of wealth, success, power, and the American dream, leads in a number of prestigious film rankings and is regarded by many as the best film ever made. Writing in PM at the time of the film's opening, Cecelia Ager notes, Before Citizen Kane, it's as if the motion picture was a slumbering monster, a mighty force stupidly sleeping, lying there, sleek, torpid, complacent-awaiting a fierce young man to come kick it to life, to rouse it, shake it, awaken it to its potentialities, to show it what it's got. seeing it, it's as if you never really saw a movie before, (qtd. in Kael 280-81) Before AFI's #1 ranking, critics in both the 1962 and 1972 Sight and Sound surveys voted it the greatest of all motion pictures (Sklar 1941). However, despite these accolades, one honor it failed to achieve was the Academy Award for best picture in 1941. This, what Andrew Sarris calls "dubious distinction" (103), went to How Green Was My Valley, John Ford's epic of family disintegration in a Welsh coal mining town based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn. Ford, who at age forty-six had already taken the best director Oscar for The Informer in 1935 and for The Grapes of Wrath in 1940, acquired his third gold statuette for directing How Green Was My Valley. All told, the film was nominated for ten Academy Awards and won six, including best supporting actor (Donald Crisp), best art direction, best sound recording, and, perhaps most surprising of all considering Gregg Toland's masterful camera work in Citizen Kane, best cinematography. It also earned Ford his fourth award from New York Film Critics. Ford himself liked the film enough to request that it be shown on the occasion of his lifetime achievement award by the Screen Directors Guild (Gallagher 454). Citizen Kane, on the other hand, although nominated for nine Academy Awards, garnered only one, presented to Herman J. Mankiewicz and Orson Welles for best original screenplay. According to Ford biographer Andrew Sarris, "The awards to Ford were sincerely granted. People at the time genuinely believed that How Green Was My Valley was a better movie than Citizen Kane. It was warmer, more disciplined, less flamboyant and less self-indulgent, in short, a repository of the classical virtues in contrast to the romantic vices of Kane" (107). While this may be true, even in light of the particularly gnarly politics surrounding William Randolph Hearst and the promotion of Kane and the film's competition in the awards, this snub of what many recognized at the time as a truly remarkable film still leads many contemporary scholars to ponder what exactly the members of the Academy in 1941 were thinking. The critical reputation of Citizen Kane has increased over time; however, recent critics stand divided in their assessments of How Green Was My Valley, which did not make the AFI top 100 list. Some praise its classic Ford storytelling, cinematography, and treatment of the family and community while others disparage it as too sentimental, or as one reviewer put it "a monstrous slurry of tears and coal dust" (qtd. in Gallagher 183). Although it is perhaps the best known American film set in Wales, the latest Lonely Planet Guidebook on the country dubbed it the "film that probably annoys the Welsh more than any other" (Hole 40). Although How Green Was My Valley does not meet with universal accolades today, it is reflective of the tone of the many fine, eloquent, nonWestern films that John Ford made in the middle of his career, bookended by his signature Westerns. Nevertheless, it unfortunately is remembered mostly for being the film that unfairly beat Citizen Kane. …