In public he frequently dismissed his westerns as potboilers and professed to remain proudest of the literary adaptations: “The Informer” (1935), “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940) and, conveniently, “How Green Was My Valley” and “The Quiet Man,” each of which earned him a best director Oscar.īased on a best-selling novel by Richard Llewellyn about growing up in a Welsh coal-mining village, “How Green Was My Valley” enjoys the dubious distinction of having beaten “Citizen Kane” for the 1941 best picture Oscar. Today Ford is best known for his westerns: films like “Stagecoach” (1939), “My Darling Clementine” (1946), “The Searchers” (1956) and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962), all of which used the lunar landscape of Monument Valley, today a Navajo tribal park that spans the border of Arizona and Utah, to create a mythic West that has long since superseded any historical reality in the popular imagination.īy and large, however, the westerns were not the films that brought Ford honor in his own lifetime (1894-1973). As luck would have it, the films have both reappeared in the last month in impressive new Blu-ray editions: “How Green” from its home studio, 20th Century Fox, and “The Quiet Man” from Olive Films, an independent label that has been licensing films that the majors no longer find profitable enough to distribute on their own. The films are “How Green Was My Valley” (1941) and “The Quiet Man” (1952), and both are the work of John Ford, the hugely gifted and richly contradictory director who remains among the greatest artists of the 20th century.
The other is an uplifting fantasy of a traditional community that continues to thrive by resisting modern encroachments, of a magnificent couple born out of conflict, and of a broken man who finds redemption by escaping the past and embracing the present. One film is a devastating study of loss - of a family destroyed, a romance interrupted and an idyllic, rural community obliterated by industrialization and corporate greed.
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