The Proud Valley

The Proud Valley

Infobox_Film
name = The Proud Valley


caption = "The Proud Valley" DVD cover
director = Pen Tennyson
producer = Michael Balcon
writer = Alfredda Brilliant
Louis Golding
Herbert Marshall
starring = Paul Robeson
Edward Chapman
Simon Lack
Rachel Thomas
distributor = Supreme Distributing Company
released = April 6 1940 (UK)
runtime = 1 hr. 16 min.
language = English
imdb_id = 0031828
amg_id = 1:106828

"Proud Valley" is a 1940 Ealing Studios film starring Paul Robeson. Filmed on location in the South Wales coalfield the heart of the main coal mining region of Wales, Proud Valley documents the hard realities of Welsh coal miners’ lives. Robeson’s part is based on the real-life adventures of a Black miner from West Virginia who drifts to Wales by way of England, searching for work. After two years of refusing offers from major studios, Robeson saw an opportunity, when he agreed to appear in this independent production, to strive to “depict the Negro as he really is—not the caricature he is always represented to be on the screen.”

With "Proud Valley", Robeson may have best succeeded in that aim. His character, David Goliath, initially wins the respect of the very musically oriented Welsh people through his singing (as did Robeson in real life). He shares the hardships of their lives, and becomes a working class hero as he helps to better their working conditions and ultimately, during a mining accident, sacrifices his life to save fellow miners.

The film is striking in that it is set and was made at a time just after the 1926 United Kingdom general strike and the Great Depression in the United Kingdom in the very communities who had undergone those struggles and furthermore was released during the early years of World War II another period of prolonged and very real struggle.

In "Proud Valley", Robeson depicts a kind of Black hero never seen in Hollywood, one who fuses his political and artistic sensibilities in the image of a Black working man who achieves kinship across boundaries of race and nationality. Years later, Robeson would remark that, of all his films, this was his favorite because it showed workers in a positive light.

ee also

How Green Was My Valley (film)

External links

*imdb title|id=0031828|title=The Proud Valley


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