The Best Old Movies on a Big Screen This Week: NYC Repertory Cinema Picks, January 13-19
How Green was My Valley (1941)
Directed by John Ford
That How Green was My Valley is set entirely within a Welsh mining town proves no impediment to the ways that the work falls directly in line with John Ford’s “Irish” pictures. This bildungsroman detailing the pastoral decay of a close community plays like the inverse of The Quiet Man, invoking a tone of lament for past traditions tied to a homeland. It is a film whose overpowering sense of nostalgia is built into every frame, each an apex of classical formal perfection, visions that are inextricable from the eyes of the child through which these moving landscapes unfold. Ford is in full expressionistic mode here, employing the simplest of gestures to contribute to an unbearably affecting poetic whole. Eric Barroso (January 17, 2pm at MoMA’s “Modern Matinees”)