This is best known among cineasts as the movie that beat Citizen Kane (and The Maltese Falcon) for the Best Picture Oscar, but that really shouldn’t be held against it (just against the petty and myopic Academy).

| Original Score: 3/4 | Feb 18, 2025

Unfairly derided as one of the most undeserving Best Picture winners, John Ford's gorgeous, heartbreaking portrait of a Welsh coal-mining community represents the best sort of cinema.

| Original Score: 4.5/5 | Sep 18, 2023

Core values, faith in God, and the importance of doing a good job well are at the center of this dreary and determined drama.

| Jun 27, 2023

You cannot translate something you do not know in your bones. Ford has made a sincere and, as I say, moving film of How Green Was My Valley; but something of the salt and wildness of the people about whom Richard Llewellyn wrote is gone.

| Aug 8, 2022

John Ford's much-honored movie about the decline of a Welsh mining family is moving and impressive in a big-Hollywood-picture way.

| Jul 28, 2022

The drama is no "made up" tale, but a panoramic glimpse of the small joys, the unmeasurable needs, the many griefs of a whole countryside. It is a story of life that is no more, but it is also a drama of people in every community.

| Jul 26, 2022

It is a cinema masterpiece of rare beauty. It brings the same thrilling experience as reading a fine piece of poetry or looking at an exquisite painting. You feel that they have come from the heart.

| Jul 26, 2022

Young Roddy McDowall is a lad of inestimable charm as Huw. Wide-eyed, sensitive, he is just the boy for the part. The cast is an altogether worthy one.

| Jul 26, 2022

How Green Was My Valley is a work of remarkable earnestness, wide sweep and considerable dramatic courage.

| Jul 26, 2022

This adaptation of Richard Llewellyn's best-selling novel is rare and lovely, rugged and true. Seeing it is an experience no lover of fine films should miss.

| Jul 26, 2022

How Green Was My Valley isn't John Ford's most exciting movie, but it is his most beautiful, far and away. It really should be called a musical.

| Jul 26, 2022

As the head of the Morgan clan, Mr. Crisp gives one of the best performances of this or any other year.

| Jul 26, 2022

There has come along a great picture, a photoplay so monumental and so moving that it belongs high in the Hollywood aristocracy of all time. How Green Was My Valley is its name, and it is a thing of faith and beauty and enduring loveliness.

| Jul 26, 2022

Mr. Donald Crisp, as the head of the Morgans, mining family, a patriarch with a touch of the Old Testament about him, does much to keep the film steady, and Miss Allgood, as his wife, gives it warmth and feeling.

| Jul 26, 2022

How Green Was My Valley is as poignantly beautiful as any picture you ever will see.

| Jul 26, 2022

One cannot but become enthusiastic over such a sincere rendition of life as this picture essays and it is astonishing how replete it is with popular appeal.

| Jul 26, 2022

The picture is vastly entertaining, in the sense of tears, humanity and humor. It has moments of sheer beauty in the provincial music, coupled with the singing rhythm of the Welsh language that Llewellyn caught so magnificently in his novel.

| Jul 26, 2022

Now you're not a Welsh coal miner and I'm not either, and neither is that guy over there, but I daresay all of us will feel we have lived the experiences of How Green Was My Valley.

| Jul 26, 2022

It amounts to an epochal cinema achievement, a masterpiece of direction and brilliant acting. But withal that it is a picture in which the elements are so mixed that its praises can hardly be sung without reservations.

| Jul 26, 2022

In How Green Was My Valley, the emotional and melodramatic impact hits with terrific force because it is so real and so completely credible. The characters in the picture appear to be living their parts rather than acting them.

| Jul 26, 2022