How Green Was My Valley

Explicit content warning

03/19/20 • 76 min

Our intrepid duo of hosts face off against an undeniable classic, the John Ford-directed family drama How Green Was My Valley, which beat Citizen Kane for Best Picture at the 1941 Academy Awards. It’s a charming nostalgic story of a family of coal miners in Wales at the end of the 19th century seen through the eyes of a young boy (pre-pubescent Roddy McDowall) who watches his beloved green valley turn black and icky because coal mining generally sucks for the environment. Of course we don’t actually see the green of the valley because the picture is shot in black and white, a decision ultimately made because Adolf Hitler just had to have Poland. The film touches on the hazards of fossil fuel extraction, the environmental cost of “progress,” and the relationship between environmental problems and labor strife.

How did Wales’s coal fuel the rise of the British Empire? Was being endowed with generous coal deposits Britain’s fortune or its curse? Can falling through thin ice and catching hypothermia really render you a paraplegic? How do you pronounce “Angharad”? Was Walter Pidgeon a beefcake in 1940 or more like a creepy old man? How did the guy who shot this picture win an Academy Award for Best Cinematography when his competition shot Citizen Kane? How do you get Malibu to look like Wales? Why do these miners always sing in such perfect harmony, and more importantly, why won’t they stop? These are the burning questions on the table in this inappropriately age-paired and unexpectedly musical episode of Green Screen.

How Green Was My Valley on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033729/

How Green Was My Valley on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/how-green-was-my-valley/

Next Movie: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Website for This Episode

How Green Was My Valley on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0033729/

How Green Was My Valley on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/how-green-was-my-valley/

Next Movie: Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Website for This Episode

Previous Episode

Invasion of the Body Snatchers

Sean and Cody’s tickets back from San Francisco somehow don’t get punched and they’re forced to settle down for another tour of the city by the bay as they discuss and review the 1978 science fiction horror thriller Invasion of the Body Snatchers, the first (and probably best) remake of the classic 1956 film. Directed by Philip Kaufman, the film features Donald Sutherland as a dauntless health inspector, Brooke Adams as his beautiful but badly-matched moll, Jeff Goldblum and Veronica Cartwright as husband and wife mud bath entrepreneurs, and Leonard Nimoy as a self-absorbed pop psychologist and possible alien pod person. After a bunch of strange flowers appear all over the city, San Franciscans start freaking out thinking their neighbors have been replaced with clones. Depending on your point of view, the film could be read as an allegory for Communism, climate change, invasive species, lead pollution, or possibly all of them.

How would the human race react to an invasion by alien plants? How do they reproduce? What does it mean that both L.A. and San Francisco have been destroyed so often by environmental disasters in fiction? How do you keep your house clean if you run a mud bath parlor as your business? Why did San Francisco become such a gay mecca? What does rat poo really look like? Can any real human being less wealthy than Mark Zuckerberg actually afford to live in San Francisco? What’s that weird thing on Nimoy’s hand? These questions and many more will be answered in this pod-tastic episode of Green Screen.

Invasion of the Body Snatchers on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0077745/

Invasion of the Body Snatchers on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/invasion-of-the-body-snatchers-1978/

Next Movie: How Green Was My Valley (1941)

Website For This Episode

Next Episode

Mad Max: Fury Road

It’s the end of the world as we know it! Sean and Cody, sequestered together as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, try to get to the bottom of exactly what happened to Earth in the unseen back-story of the Mad Max post-apocalyptic universe. In the film, one-armed truck driver Imperator Furiosa (Charlize Theron) sets out to drive four princesses and one Zoë Kravitz across a bandit-infested desert, with a punked-out army of crazies huffing silver spray paint and driving exhibits from Harrah’s automobile museum in hot pursuit. Analysis of Mad Max: Fury Road involves the history of post-apocalyptic literature from 1826 to the Walking Dead; fears of climate change and nuclear war as shared collective anxiety; why Australia is particularly vulnerable to environmental disaster; how editing can make or break a complex movie; and how the world changed in the 30 years since Mad Max was last seen on the big screen in 1985’s Beyond Thunderdome.

What’s the recipe for survival in a post-nuclear wasteland? Why would you want a blood transfusion while driving? Why does the villain look like an old man inexplicably dressed up like a He-Man action figure? Are all the Mad Max movies unacknowledged sequels to a Gregory Peck film from the ‘50s? Why is Mary Shelley the literary progenitor of Mad Max? What was the “Blitzkrieg Bunker Bar” and what does it have to do with this film? How does Charlize Theron stack up to Tina Turner? Why do Internet misogynists really, really hate this movie? Is Nicholas Hoult leading man material or is he fated to be another “that guy”? All these and more are fuel in the tank of this fast and furious episode of Green Screen.

Mad Max: Fury Road on IMDB: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1392190/

Mad Max: Fury Road on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/film/mad-max-fury-road/

Next Movie: Bottle Shock (2008)

Website For This Episode