An elaborate Welsh village was constructed by Fox for this film, which was stunningly photographed by Arthur Miller and which, in this 35mm nitrate print, displays the uniquely poetic quality of John Ford's finest films. Ford's screen version of Richard Llewellyn's sentimental story of a Welsh coal-mining family at the turn of the century destroyed by the greed of industrialists was awarded five Oscars. The film is constructed in flashback, to the recollections of the youngest Morgan son (Roddy McDowell) as he heads out of his village for parts unknown. He tells of his parents (Donald Crisp and Sara Allgood), his four older brothers, all miners, his sister (Maureen O'Hara in her first featured Ford role), and the minister who loved her (Walter Pidgeon). In his book, The Cinema of John Ford, John Baxter writes, “To Ford, ‘family' is a concept more than a group of people, a dynamic, not a static institution, an instrument for change rather than for stability.... As in The Grapes of Wrath, the family (here) is not so much destroyed as encouraged to change, and in changing to dominate its environment, a process that detaches some members but ends with the purpose fulfilled....”