February 4 movie: The Corn is Green. Bette Davis plays a schoolteacher in a Welsh mining town who teaches basic literacy to the unwashed masses, and helps one brilliant student (John Dall, the villain in Rope) get into Oxford. Dall's Welsh accent was terrible, but at least he tried. Davis' character wasn't Welsh, and her voice is always a bit affected so she didn't really have to speak differently.
This could have been an interesting story about preserving cultural identity vs. self-improvement, but they gloss over that pretty quickly. After a brief and easily overcome period of negativity, no one in the village is threatened or resentful that Dall stops working in the mine, starts talking differently and dressing differently from the rest of them. Which is not to say that I wanted to see the villagers trying to keep him down. Just that I think it would be more natural to see some suspicion when a member of a close-knit community isolates himself from the rest, as if "bettering himself" means "not one of us anymore."
It reminds me of that Monty Python sketch about the playwright whose son wants to be a miner. The playwright is angry and accuses his son of behaving like he's too good for the London theater community.
So was Old Mother Hubbard Welsh or something? Because at the end of the movie the old ladies in the village dress up in their best clothes to celebrate Dall getting into Oxford. And I swear to god they looked just like Old Mother Hubbard. That pointy stove-pipe hat and the big dress with the white ruffled collar and the big buckle.
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Re The Corn is Green: The "Old Mother Hubbard" costumes are reasonably close to the Welsh national dress, at least to those worn by Welsh women on ceremonial occasions. Whether these costumes are authentic or were invented for tourist consumption, like the Scottish Highland Games, I know not. I was disappointed in this movie. It was far too unrealistic and about as bad as the old Olivier version of Pride and Prejudice. Having come up from the British working class in a similar way to the hero in this movie, I would have liked to have been able to identify with him, but the painted scenery and the poor screen play and acting made this impossible. Incidently, unlike the hero, I didn't make it to Oxford, although I tried. Perhaps this was because I wasn't lucky enough to have Bette Davis as a private tutor, although I'm sure chemistry, physics, and math would not have been her strong points.