PARAMOUNT THEATRE

Dominion, Volume 36, Issue 25, 24 October 1942, Page 10

PARAMOUNT THEATRE

The patient lines ot filmgoers who paid their good money recently to see “How. Green Was Mv Valley” at the Plaza must, during the seven-weeks’ season, have included every man, woman and child in Wellington. Or so this critic thought. He was pardonably sceptical theretore when he was told that, of a dozen flats m a block at Oriental Bay. the residents ol only two of them had seen the picture at the finish of the season. But, after a glimpse at tlie huge house which greeted the first night of a return season at the Paramount, he must contend that there is, still a big audience left for one of the best pictures ef 1942. “How Green Was My Valley” raises the prestige of the cinema as an art. silences those blue stockings who always vow that "the picture, of course, is nothing like the book,” and provides those who would give us a new order with a fine piece of propaganda. This is Britain to the core, a Britain io work for. to love, sometimes, even, to be ashamed of. But it smells of the' earth, the deep, good <;arth from which our national character springs. The story of the growth of industrialism in ‘i green Welsh valley, seen through lhe eves of a small boy, is told as fervently on the screen as it’was in the faultless prose of Richard Llewellyn. The ■ cast is hand-picked, particular praise going to Donald Meek as the oldfashioned, God-fearing father and to Roddy McDowell as the little boy whose childhood years saw the rise and decline of the valley of coal. “Henrv and Dizzy” is the uninspiring title of the second film, another of the Henry Aldrich series.