The Corn Is Green

Miss Moffat moves from England to a Welsh mining town and opens a school in her own house to teach reading and writing to boys who have been down the pit since they were ten. The local squire is against it and the families do not want to lose the few pennies their children bring in. Reading an essay written by one of the pupils, Morgan Evans, Moffat becomes convinced the boy could get into Oxford and throws everything she has at it. It comes from Emlyn Williams's play, written out of his own childhood. What makes the film interesting is that it refuses to leave the rescue story smooth: Moffat's ambition at times reaches the point of disregarding the pupil's own life, and the film does not look away from that. Bette Davis was thirty-seven when she took the part and played a woman considerably older. John Dall, who plays Morgan, was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar.