How Green Was My Valley (John Ford, 1941)
This film has old Hollywood charm to it and I can see how fans of classic studio films have grown to love this film, but I found it to be overall dull. The film did not appear to take advantage of the contrast with lighting that you get with black and white, something Ford had mastered with Gregg Toland in The Grapes of Wrath (1940). Here the lighting was very plain, and at times it seemed that there was too much light, either bleaching out the faces of the actors or throwing odd shadows on the ceilings and walls of the sets. There is also not a lot emotion from the characters for a storyline that has lots of emotional events in it. This is not to say that the actors did not hit their marks and convey the characters well, it just seemed that people in the small valley took death very lightly, with men simply taken of their hats and women fainting. This does bring up another point, although I am not a feminist by any means, I do know that I would never want to live in a place like this as a woman. This has nothing against the quality of the film, as it shows the role of women in turn of the century Welsh society (that and since the film was made in 1941, no one probably thought to address the issue of women as just bystanders because that status had not changed much). This dose add a little more personal dissatisfaction to a film that over all, did not have much of a personal connection for me. Saying that I feel that this film is a great example of the classic Hollywood studio area and would use it in demonstrations.