John Ford’s ‘Valley’ Is Green Again

In the years since John Ford’s 1941 classic “How Green Was My Valley” first swept up audiences with its sentimental story of a Welsh mining family, decay and age had settled in. Arthur Miller’s exquisite black-and-white cinematography was a graying, scratched shadow of its former self. The soundtrack was pock-marked with hisses and pops. The Oscar-winning film was as broken by time as the coal-mining town that provided the backdrop for its story.

It was one of many early movies whose fate was in question. More than half of the 21,000 shorts and feature films made on highly unstable nitrate stock before the introduction of cellulose-based film stock in 1950 have been lost. Only about 10% of the movies produced in the United States prior to 1929 still exist.

But through a consortium of cable’s American Movie Classics, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive, the UCLA Film & Television Archive and with the cooperation of 20th Century Fox, “How Green Was My Valley” has been restored to pristine condition in time for the millennium. Starring Maureen O’Hara, Walter Pidgeon, Donald Crisp and a 13-year-old Roddy McDowall, the newly restored version will premiere tonight on AMC as part of the network’s Seventh Annual Film Preservation Festival.

“How Green Was My Valley” will be the centerpiece of a reintroduction of some of Ford’s more obscure work to television audiences throughout the festival. For the next three days, AMC will pay tribute to the four-time Oscar-winning director with showings of “My Darling Clementine,” “The Grapes of Wrath,” “The Searchers,” “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” and “Cheyenne Autumn”; two of his acclaimed war documentaries, “The Battle of Midway” and “December 7th”; several of his silent features including his first film, 1917’s “Straight Shooting”; and such early sound films as “Men Without Women,” “Four Sons” and “The Seas Beneath.”

This year marks the first time the cable channel has singled out the works of a particular director to present during the Preservation Festival. In the past, the focus has been on genre--last year featuring classic war films; the year before, film noir.

It was Ford’s ability to capture the American experience that led AMC to choose to highlight the depth and range of the filmmaker’s work.

“The films he directed from the western to the Irish American experience to his war films, all encompassed what we truly describe as American,” says David Sehring, executive in charge of film preservation for AMC. “His films really define what our cultural heritage is all about--his work really encompasses a wealth of Americana.”

In part, the festival is designed to raise funds via audience and industry contributions for future film preservation, and through its first six years, AMC has generated nearly $2 million to assist in the restoration of dramatic features, documentaries and newsreels. The monies go to the Film Foundation. Founded by director Martin Scorsese, the foundation allocates funds to seven archives: the George Eastman House, the Museum of Modern Art Film Department, the National Center for Film and Video Preservation at the American Film Institute, UCLA Film & Television Archive, the Library of Congress Motion Picture Division, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Film Archive and the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The program ensured that the 1939 film “Stagecoach,” which starred John Wayne and earned Ford an Oscar nomination, was preserved, as well as some of the director’s silent films through the Museum of Modern Art’s archive program.

Restoring “How Green Was My Valley” required patience, a good bit of sleuthing and finally the complex reconstruction work itself conducted by a team of specialists. The process began several years ago when the motion picture academy began examining the condition of all the films that had won an Oscar as best picture.

“We had a nitrate print we had gotten in 1941 from John Ford,” says Michael Friend, director of the academy’s film archive. “At the same time, UCLA, with whom we work closely, also had a nitrate print. We also repatriated a nitrate dupe negative from Australia.”

Original Negative Was Long Gone

Schawn Belston headed the participation of 20th Century Fox, which opened its vaults for the project. Inside, the team unearthed several nitrate elements as well as a safety negative that was made in the 1970s. “The original negative was gone for a long time,” Friend says. “The last time it was seen was in the 1970s.”

Still all of the originals and dupes had flaws. Several reels of the safety negative were considered to be unacceptable.

“They had visible problems, dirt that had gotten into the emulsion as well as splices,” Friend says. “So we went to the nitrate duplicate negative and replaced some of the sections. It is a procedure of finding the earliest generation materials and then finding what parts ofit are inadequate and replacing those with the next generation of material.”

The academy, Friend says, had technical discussions with other archives such as the British Film Institute to discover “whether or not they had other material that might be more serviceable than what we could get our hands on. We try to be rather exhaustive in exploring all the places we can find material. You never know what you are going to get until you make a print of it. That’s very hard to know at the beginning of a process like this, so usually if you don’t call in all of the elements you feel kind of stupid.”

The academy’s Michael Pogorzelski with lab services provided by Triage Laboratory, supervised the restoration of the visual images, while preservation officer Robert Gitt and film preservationist Ross Lippman of UCLA, working with Audio Mechanics and DJ Audio, restored the soundtrack. It was an extremely collaborative effort. “The academy people sat in on some of the sound transfer work,” Gitt says. “We sat in on some of the screenings of the test of the picture.”

Gitt used both of the nitrate prints to produce a new soundtrack master. Originally, Gitt says, the film’s soundtrack was superb.

“Fox had a good sound department,” he says. “But the film’s negative and soundtrack negative were printed hundreds of times. In those days, they would make hundreds of prints off the picture negative and the sound negative. By the time they were put back in the vault, they were already worn out. So copies made in recent years had a lot of hisses and crackles and pops and splices. Even in some of the restoration work that was done a decade or so ago there were still some noises and things.”

Digital technology, however, has made it possible to remove the sound flaws.

“We have a very good soundtrack,” he says. “It is the authentic soundtrack, which means it is how the film was heard originally. It is in mono sound. We have not stereo-ized it or modernized it in any way. The sound is the way it was when it was brand-new before there was any wear and tear.”

* “How Green Was My Valley” can be seen tonight at 5 and 9 on AMC.

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The Festival Schedule

Today

3 a.m.: “Straight Shooting” (1917)

4:15 a.m.: “The Village Blacksmith” (1922)

4:30 a.m.: “Iron Horse” (1924)

7 a.m.: “Lightnin’ ” (1925)

8:45 a.m.: “Four Men and a Prayer” (1938)

10:15 a.m.: “The World Moves On” (1934)

12:15 p.m.: “The Battle of Midway” (1942)

12:45 p.m.: “December 7th” (1943)

1:30 p.m.: “When Willie Comes Marching Home” (1950)

3 p.m.: “What Price Glory?” (1952)

5 p.m.: “How Green Was My Valley” (1941)

7:05 p.m.: John Ford documentary

9 p.m.: “How Green Was My Valley” (1941)

11:05 p.m.: “What Price Glory?” (1952)

*

Saturday

1:05 a.m.: “Mother Machree” (1928)

1:45 a.m.: “Men Without Women” (1930)

3 a.m.: “The Blue Eagle” (1926)

4:15 a.m.: “The Shamrock Handicap” (1926)

5:30 a.m.: “Four Sons” (1928)

7:30 a.m.: “Riley the Cop” (1928)

9 a.m.: “Seas Beneath” (1931)

10:30 a.m.: “Dr. Bull” (1933)

Noon: “The Prisoner of Shark Island” (1936)

1:45 p.m.: “The AFI Life Achievement Awards--John Ford” (1973)

3 p.m.: “Donovan’s Reef” (1963)

5 p.m.: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962)

7:15 p.m.: “My Darling Clementine” (1946)

9 p.m.: “Donovan’s Reef” (1963)

11 p.m.: “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” (1962)

*

Sunday

1:05 a.m.: “My Darling Clementine” (1946)

3 a.m.: “Three Bad Men” (1926)

4:35 a.m.: “Hangman’s House” (1928)

5:45 a.m.: “Salute” (1929)

7:15 a.m.: “Airmail” (1932)

8:45 a.m.: “Pilgrimage” (1933)

10:30 a.m.: “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)

12:40 p.m.: John Ford documentary

2:35 p.m.: “The Long Gray Line” (1955)

5 p.m.: “The Searchers” (1956)

7:05 p.m.: “AMC Behind the Screen”

7:35 p.m.: “Cheyenne Autumn” (1964)

10:15 p.m.: John Ford documentary

*

Monday morning

12:15 a.m.: John Ford documentary

12:45 a.m.: “The Grapes of Wrath” (1940)