SECRET MOVIE CLUB presents
Part of our JOHN FORD FUNDAMENTALS Series, Friday, December 9, 2022
LOCATION: The Secret Movie Club Theater, 1917 Bay Street, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, CA 90021
*Please note entrance/parking is actually in the back of the building. Make a right on Wilson Street, then a right behind the building. We’re the first set of black steps after the big gate.
7:30pm HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (1941, dir. John Ford, Fox, USA, 118mns, *35mm being sought with DCP backup if necessary)
10pm WEE WILLIE WINKIE (1937, dir. John Ford, Fox, USA, 100mns, DCP)
As we head into the final stretch of our John Ford series, we saved some of the very best for last. It’s December. The holiday season. And we wanted to have a finale fit for Ford himself.
Tonight, we screen one of his absolute best, the movie that won Ford his third Best Director Oscar (out of four!): How Green Was My Valley. A movie about the joys and tribulations of the Morgans, a Welsh mining family (shot on incredible sets built in the Malibu mountains), How Green Was My Valley is filled with Fordian poetry, humanity, bittersweetness at its very best. The movie marks the debut of Maureen O'Hara (who would later co-star in such Ford greats as Rio Grande and The Quiet Man) into the Ford repertory company. It also showcases a stellar young performance by Roddy McDowell as youngest son Huw (and the narrator of the picture).
As Ford was wont to do, even though he’s making a movie about Welsh miners, one feels he’s really making a movie about his own large, working class family. The tremendous love and reverence he shows for family rituals, the strength of mothers, and the importance of pulling together in times of struggle echoes his other family-driven pictures, namely The Grapes of Wrath (just made a year before).
Ford also introduces a surprisingly emotional coda to the entire picture (we won’t ruin it by giving it away) that we dare you not to tear up and smile at at the same time.
The kind of movie you point to when you say “This is the very best of classic Hollywood cinema”, How Green Was My Valley is a movie we highly encourage you to see in the theater. It is the best kind of holiday gift.
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Sometimes John Ford’s departure movies (those that seem way out of his normal wheelhouse of examinations of American history, conflicted masculinity, families, communities, Irish-American identity) turn out to be some of his most fascinating. Like when Martin Scorsese makes Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore or After Hours.
It still seems a bit of a mystery why Daryl Zanuck and Fox felt Ford was the director to helm the Shirley Temple children’s movie Wee Willie Winkie but history has proven them right. It’s one of the great movies of the 1930’s and one of Ford’s most purely enjoyable and joyous.
Based on a Rudyard Kipling story, Wee Willie Winkie tells of young Priscilla Williams (Temple), her mother Joyce, and the gruff but teddy bear Sergeant Donald MacDuff (Ford regular Victor McLaglen) during a British conflict with an Indian fighter chief named Khoda Khan.
Much of the movie plays like a variation of Charlie Chaplin’s The Kid as Priscilla wins the heart of MacDuff and even Khoda Khan with her sincerity and kindness. The movie also focuses on a favorite theme of Ford’s: knowing when NOT to fight. Surprisingly the entire movie -- rather than becoming a rousing jingoist war picture of derring-do -- turns into a very humanist meditation on those traits that move humanity regardless of race and background.
Ford often loved to tell the story of how one of the movie’s greatest sequences: a funeral march under dramatic skies was completely improvised when the filmmakers noticed how striking the expressionistic weather was that day.
Ford so loved working with Temple that he cast her in one of her very first adult roles ten years later in Fort Apache.
Wee Willie Winkie is a delight from start to finish and shows that Ford, far from only being good in his comfort zone, actually strove his entire life, like Scorsese, to make small pictures from time to time that would expand and test his range.
Best always,
Craig Hammill
Secret Movie Club Founder.Programmer
FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
REFUNDS:
We can offer refunds up to 24 hours before showtime. Please request a refund through Eventbrite and we will process ASAP. After that, no refunds. Sorry.
However if something last minute comes up and you can’t make the screening, for whatever reason, just write to us before showtime: community@secretmovieclub.com and we’ll offer you complimentary tickets to a future screening, good for 90 days. (Disclaimer: Future screening must have available tickets, cannot be a fundraiser, and must be comparably priced)
HELPFUL SECRET MOVIE CLUB (1917 Bay Street, 2nd Floor, LA, CA 90021) THEATER PARKING TIPS:
We recommend that you park just outside our theater. Remember our theater is actually in a beautiful street art alleyway in the back of the 1917 Bay Street building. You get to our entrance by taking a right on Wilson, then a right behind the building. We are the first set of black steps on the right after the big gate.
There is also a parking lot at the corner of Mateo and Violet Street, just 2 blocks from our theater, which costs $7 per car.
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HOW CAN I CONTACT YOU IF I HAVE OTHER QUESTIONS/RECOMMENDATIONS:
You can always email us at community@secretmovieclub.com with any other questions, concerns, thoughts, recommendations.