The Corn Is Green

This fully vibrant adaptation of Emlyn Williams' successful stage play is at its best in its first half-watching Bette Davis sweep into a tiny town in the Welsh countryside and take over with her new world ideas makes you so grateful to see such a strong female character in such an old film (truth be told, seeing a strong woman was highly more likely in a wartime film in the forties, as opposed to the post-war-prosperity fifties when women were either Sandra Dee or Donna Reed). John Dall stars as the miner who turns out to be quite gifted in scholastic abilities, whom Davis pushes to reach for the stars academically. The second half of the film, which concerns itself with Dall's trying for Oxford and dealing with a few ‘domestic' problems, isn't as invigorating as the first, but on the whole it's a beautiful experience of a film, and one of the few Hollywood films of its time to accurately (if broadly) show a foreign culture and its common people. Remade with less success as a telefilm in 1979 with Katharine Hepburn and directed by George Cukor.