What the movie reckons with is what happens when those rituals are disrupted and then discarded forever.

John Ford's much-honored movie about the decline of a Welsh mining family is moving and impressive in a big-Hollywood-picture way.

The drama is no "made up" tale, but a panoramic glimpse of the small joys, the unmeasurable needs, the many griefs of a whole countryside. It is a story of life that is no more, but it is also a drama of people in every community.

This is best known among cineasts as the movie that beat Citizen Kane (and The Maltese Falcon) for the Best Picture Oscar, but that really shouldn’t be held against it (just against the petty and myopic Academy).