How Green Was My Valley

I've never fully bought into Trey Parker & Matt Stone's "But, Therefore" rule of writing. For those who don't know, Parker & Stone assert that, in writing a story, if you can connect the scenes with "and then", the writing portrays a sequence of unconnected events, but if you can use either "but" or "therefore", the sequence of events flow from one to another, showing causality. To me, "and then", "but", and "therefore" all, in this context, feel like synonyms. The difference between "John only got three hours of sleep and then he got in a car accident on the way to work" and "John drove to work this morning, but he only got three hours of sleep last night, therefore he got in a car accident" is structural, but both convey the story adequately. That being said, few things in life are 100% in the yes or no column. How Green Was My Valley gave me reason to consider that there is a way to write "and then" stories that fails in the exact way Parker & Stone describe. It is one of those family portrait-through-the-years movies Hollywood loved back in the day. Every one I've seen so far suffers from the same problem, and How Green Was My Valley isn't an outlier here. It is a sequence of events. A problem arises and is resolved in five minutes, with minimal impact on the overall narrative. Lather, rinse, repeat. There's a coal miner's strike that lasts from autumn to spring the next year (at least). How does it resolve? Because the narrator said it did. How did the miners support themselves in the interim? Don't ask. The mine owner's son wants to court the only daughter of the main family. Have they interacted before? Doesn't matter, here he is, asking dad for permission, and they're married a scene later with literally not a single line of shared dialogue. It's no big deal, she won't be seen again for another 45 minutes, and the husband never again. How Green Was My Valley doesn't feel like a movie; it plays out like a last-season-on recap of a melodramatic family show like Dr. Quinn or Little House On The Prairie. Quick hits to remind you of what happened before we resolve the cliffhanger! ... except this isn't TV, so it all feels unsatisfying. A rote recitation of the family's life for a couple years (which is undercut by the youngest boy never aging). The writing is no help either. Characters are broad and flat, the minimal amount necessary to execute the checklist of this family's life story. Every character can be summarized with one adjective, two if they're lucky. Dialogue isn't spoken, it's pontificated in grand, theatrical fashion, delivered with the passion of a general right before charging into battle, whether it deserves it or not, and it almost never does. The acting is equally dodgy. Not bad, just bland, with only Walter Pidgeon's pastor character feeling like he has any blood in his veins ... now if only he could've been bothered to try an accent, any damned accent at all. Welsh, Irish, Dutch, Cajun, anything. How Green Was My Valley's greatest sin isn't being bad, it's being unremarkable in any way. It is one of a hundred of these kinds of movies made in that era of Hollywood, and it is virtually indistinguishable from the rest. Swap the names between this and something like Cavalcade and you'd barely know the difference. I'll give HGWMV credit for being beautifully shot, and the commitment to building that entire town in California was amazing (they couldn't film in Wales due to WW2). But this is a turgid, lifeless movie that drags its feet to go nowhere you haven't been before.