How Green Was My Valley. 1942. USA. Directed by John Ford. Screenplay by Philip Dunne, based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn. With Walter Pidgeon, Maureen O’Hara, Donald Crisp, Anna Lee, Roddy McDowall. 35mm. 118 min.
In The Last Picture Show, Bogdanovich gives pride of place to an exuberant citation from Howard Hawks’s Red River, but the film’s plangent sense of community and change draws more on the spirit of John Ford. Like Ford, Bogdanovich anchors his sweeping epic of social change in the immediate and particular, building a suite of incidents and anecdotes that celebrate the community as a living thing and observe its inevitable decline.