Valley of Song

The Wedding of Lilli Marlene

The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan

The Beggar’s Opera

Always a Bride

Melba

Laughing Anne

Forces’ Sweetheart

The Limping Man

It’s a Grand Life

Trouble in Store

February

Associated British Picture Corporation’s Valley of Song began as a radio play by Cliff Gordon, a self-styled ‘storm in a Welsh tea-cup’, broadcast on the BBC Home Service in 1946 with no less than Ivor Novello (himself a Welshman) as ‘Llewellyn the Choir’. A BBC Television production with a ‘television script’ by Gordon and Michael Mills followed two years later, without Novello but with Rachel Thomas repeating her radio performance as the redoubtable Mrs Lloyd, around whom this gentle comedy revolves.

The problem erupts when one of the favourite but long-absent sons of Cwmpant returns to the village. Geraint Llewellyn’s reappearance is timely: the community’s choir master has just died, and Geraint (Clifford Evans) is unanimously applauded as his successor, preparing the choir’s annual performance of Handel’s Messiah for the national eisteddfod. All is set fair until he selects Mrs Davies (Betty Cooper) for the contralto solo. Unknown to him, that role has always been taken by Mrs Mair Lloyd, wife of the undertaker. Affronted and hurt to have been replaced, she walks out of the choir practice, and the battle lines between the Davies and Lloyd families (and so between factions in the village) are drawn. This is particularly difficult for young Cliff Lloyd (John Fraser) and Olwn Davies (Maureen Swanson), in love and wanting to marry.

As Kinematograph Weekly percipiently understood, the film ‘provides much genuine amusement without a hint of malice’. It’s a total delight, produced by Vaughan N. Dean and directed with obvious affection and an eye to every nuance by Gilbert Gunn. Much of its charm is due to its utter Welshness and the exhilarating comedy from such as Rachel Roberts as Bessie the Milk, an almost Wagnerian Boudicca of the dairy, hilariously roaring from house to house in her milk-float chariot as she dispenses village gossip; John Glyn-Jones as bed-ridden Ebenezer Davies, avid for his space-age comic; Madoline Thomas never missing a chance as muddlesome Auntie Mary. To add gravitas, there is always Mervyn Johns, repeating his radio role of Revd Idris Griffiths.