HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY: <i> screenplay and introductory essay by Philip Dunne (Santa Theresa Press: $27.50; 105 pp.).</i>

Nominated for 10 Academy Awards, winner of five--it won best picture in a year when the competition included “Citizen Kane” and “The Maltese Falcon”--this tale of a young boy’s coming of age in a Welsh mining town was director John Ford’s personal favorite and one of the most deservedly beloved of all American films. Now screenwriter Philip Dunne has written an elegantly feisty essay on the film’s making which sheds a fascinating light on everything from Fox’s original plans to shoot it as a full-color, four-hour epic on location in Wales to the vagaries of working for the protean Darryl F. Zanuck. A fine memoir of what “Valley’s” young star Roddy McDowall (seen above with Walter Pidgeon in a scene that was cut from the final version) has understandably called “The happiest place to make movies in all the world.”