The Green Years

The Easter movie presentation at the Radio City Music Hall was the premiere of MGM‘s THE GREEN YEARS based on A.J. Cronin’s novel, a best seller in 1945. The film's trailer and schedule of showings can be found here at the TMC website.

A former physician, Cronin had been regularly hitting the best-seller list since the early 1930s but was not a favorite of literary critics, who found him, at best, that damnable thing, the good middle-brow storyteller. Most of his novels had an inspirational theme usually from a Catholic point of view. Several of his novels previously had been turned into movies, most notably “The Citadel,” which had starred Robert Donat and Rosalind Russell in 1938, and the 1944 film “The Keys of the Kingdom,” which had earned screen neophyte Gregory Peck an Academy Award nomination. In “The Green Years” Cronin drew upon his own experiences growing up in Scotland as the Catholic son of a mixed marriage.

Cronin's novel and its film adaptation tells the story of the struggles of an orphaned Irish Catholic youth to make something of himself and cling to his faith despite the disapproval of his mother's dour, penny-pinching, working-class Scottish Protestant family who had taken him in, as well as the bigotry of his classmates and cruel twists of fate.

The April 18 ad in The New York Times highlighted the film’s critical accolades. “It IS a wonderful picture,” said Kate Cameron in the Daily News, the city’s largest circulation paper by a wide margin, the morning read for the average working stiff. “Tender and touching…appealing and warm…human and humorous… a high-minded hit,” was Bosley Crowther’s verdict in The New York Times, the newspaper of record for the city’s elite. Rose Pelswick in the Hearst paper, the Journal-American, with a largely lower-middle-class, outer borough readership, found it “stirring and heartwarming…a memorable entertainment.” According to the April 17 ad, Alton Cooke of the World-Telegram, a favorite of white-collar, middle-management types, said it was “sensitive, fervent…the cast bristles with brilliance…You will not often find a picture full of so many ringing merits.” Eileen Creelman of the Sun, read by the suburban Old Guard, found it “an extraordinarily good picture…to be seen and cherished” and Howard Barnes also recommended it in the Herald-Tribune, the second read of East Side sophisticates. Although not quoted in the ads, John McCarten of The New Yorker thought it worth seeing, although overlong and slow moving in parts and directed with a heavy hand by Victor Saville, particularly the religious scenes. He wrote that from the camerawork and sound track you would think the kid’s first Holy Communion was “as massive a ceremony as the investiture of a cardinal."

This was exactly the kind of movie that James Agee, the most respected film critic of the era, who wrote the unsigned movie reviews in Time as well as a by-lined movie column that ran every other week in The Nation, deplored. For Time he wrote that " 'The Green Years’ (MGM) is one of those genteel and interminable stories of ‘character,’ ‘conflict’ and ‘faith’ which invariably impress lower-middle-brows as ‘big,’ ‘heartwarming’ and, above all, ‘human.’” Well, so much for Cameron, Crowther and Pelswick. He did, however, have positive words for the actors, singling out Charles Coburn, who had top billing, and Hume Cronyn. He was less kind in his April 27 film column for The Nation where he wrote “’The Green Years’ has been described in the ads as ‘wonderful’ by practically everybody within Louis B. Mayer’s purchasing power except his horses; so I hesitate to ask you to take my word for it: the picture is awful.”

The cast included no big box office names. Popular character actor Charles Coburn received top billing and the best reviews as the boy’s pugnacious, cantankerous, supportive great-grandfather, a performance that won him his third Oscar nomination, but once again as a supporting actor. Coburn had the lead role as a former Confederate officer in another film, “Colonel Effingham’s Raid,” which opened in New York on the same day as “The Green Years” but which had run only one week in first run. Curly-haired nine-year old Dean Stockwell, who previously had a featured role in the 1945 MGM hit musical “Anchors Aweigh,” played the protagonist as a boy. Stockwell's father, Harry, was a Broadway actor who had starred earlier this season in the operetta "Marinka" and had a stint as Curly in "Oklahoma." Boyishly handsome and sincere Tom Drake, a Brooklyn youth who had played Judy Garland’s boy next door in another recent MGM hit, “Meet Me in St. Louis,” played the hero as a young man. Teenager Beverly Tyler, who had been groomed by MGM since she was 14 as a prospective musical star, was his love interest in her first major role. You might have read in the papers that week that MGM had added both Drake and Tyler to the cast of their upcoming movie about the development of the atom bomb, “The Beginning or the End,” and the gossip columns said that the duo was sweet on each other.

Hume Cronyn played the boy’s mean-spirited, tight-fisted grandfather. It was a big year for the 34-year-old actor who also had supporting roles in “A Letter For Evie,” “The Postman Always Rings Twice,” “The Ziegfeld Follies of 1946” and “The Sailor Takes a Wife.” His wife, Jessica Tandy, two years his senior, played his daughter in “The Green Years.” Not yet as familiar to movie audiences as her husband, Tandy could also be seen on screen that week in a supporting role in "Dragonwyck." The rest of the cast was made up of accomplished character actors including Gladys Cooper as the boy’s great grandmother, Selena Royle as the grandmother, Richard Haydn, Norman Lloyd and Wallace Ford.

The ads run by the Music Hall for the engagement were conservative, emphasizing the positive critical reaction. However, MGM ran an ad in the Herald Tribune on April 14 that showed a young couple in a passionate embrace. The ad copy read in part "At seventeen a girl's heart is so wise--a boy's so achingly unsure." The movie was positioned as "the thrilling adventure of youth in love."

Variety reported that, despite the lack of big name cast, Radio City Music Hall had sold almost as many tickets to “The Green Years” in its third week as it had for the third week of its Christmas attraction, “The Bells of St. Mary’s,” the theater's box office record holder at the time. During Easter week, beginning the Saturday before the holiday, the Music Hall doors opened at 7:30 AM to accommodate the crowds. On Easter Sunday, however, the Greater New York Federation of Churches was holding its traditional sunrise service at Radio City, for which the Music Hall’s 165 choristers would perform hymns and inspirational music to an overflow crowd of 7,000.

“The Green Years” would be number 12 on Variety’s list of the biggest moneymakers of 1946 and many critics, including Bosley Crowther, placed it high on their lists of the year’s best, Agee be damned. The National Society of Film Critics named it as one of the ten most entertaining films of the year. Unsurprisingly it had the ringing endorsement of the Catholic Church, whose accolades and condemnations, as passed down by the Legion of Decency, were a force to reckon with in 1946. It is not available on DVD or VHS but it pops up on rare occasions on TMC.