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This was a late-night tv surprise. The Corn is Green is a highly engaging drama. Bette Davis is good as the well-intentioned, well-meaning but not always successful social engineer and pioneer in adult education, set in a rural Welsh mining town. A surprisingly 'modern' film for its release date with regard to its frankness about out-of-wedlock pregnancy. There was a good deal of Welsh language banter and phrases peppered throughout the film, despite the story's bias against Welsh in preference for the male lead receiving a 'proper' education in English. The film cannot be faulted for its expression of negative attitudes toward the indigenous language of Wales since minority languages were viewed as a detriment to progress in the modern world at the time. We know better now, but much damage has been done to the likes of the people depicted in the Welsh mining town of the Corn is Green, surrounded by a larger culture bent on their assimilation. This is an entertaining and near-tragic story which made me think.

This fully vibrant adaptation of Emlyn Williams' successful stage play is at its best in its first half-watching Bette Davis sweep into a tiny town in the Welsh countryside and take over with her new world ideas makes you so grateful to see such a strong female character in such an old film (truth be told, seeing a strong woman was highly more likely in a wartime film in the forties, as opposed to the post-war-prosperity fifties when women were either Sandra Dee or Donna Reed). John Dall stars as the miner who turns out to be quite gifted in scholastic abilities, whom Davis pushes to reach for the stars academically. The second half of the film, which concerns itself with Dall's trying for Oxford and dealing with a few ‘domestic' problems, isn't as invigorating as the first, but on the whole it's a beautiful experience of a film, and one of the few Hollywood films of its time to accurately (if broadly) show a foreign culture and its common people. Remade with less success as a telefilm in 1979 with Katharine Hepburn and directed by George Cukor.

Bette Davis in her career got 10 nominations and two Oscars for Best Actress. I was amazed to learn that The Corn Is Green was not one of the ten. This has to be one of her five best films. And the interesting thing about it is that her performance as Ms. Moffatt contains none of the Bette Davis shtick we associate with her.

The Corn Is Green, a play by Emlyn Williams ran for 477 performances on Broadway between 1940 to 1942 and then in 1943 the road company was called back to Broadway to give another 56 performances during that season. The role of Ms. Moffatt the school teacher originated with Ethel Barrymore and three members of the Broadway cast repeated their roles for the screen, Mildred Dunnock, Rosalind Ivan, and Rhys Williams.

Because Ethel Barrymore would have been 61 at the time she debuted with The Corn is Green on Broadway and Davis only 37 of necessity the interpretations would have been different. Davis has been left some property in a Welsh village and she's unlike any woman who's ever come there. She has an MA from Oxford, the fact she can read and write strikes some as amazing. She resolves to teach the young folks in the village to do the same, a plan with which a lot of the villagers are opposed.

Most notably opposed is Nigel Bruce who plays the local titled gentry in the place and who prides the fact that the folks there call him 'squire' in many different tones of voice. He's a living embodiment of the Colonel Blimp character from Great Britain. He also is an owner of the local mine and he's quite frank in that if you start teaching people how to read and write who knows what kind of unrest it could lead to. He was my favorite character in the film. One scene in it is priceless how Bette Davis who first tells him what an oaf he is later decides to use a little flattery to get what she wants from him.

What she wants is his patronage for a certain young miner who shows great promise and a literary bent. That would be John Dall who if he can tear himself away from his drinking buddies at the tavern and the attentions of town tart Joan Lorring has a chance to go to Oxford, he's that intelligent.

Education was the theme here and a theme in that other Welsh classic How Green Was My Valley where the hopes and dreams of the Morgan family are wrapped up in Roddy McDowall going to school and getting an education to escape a life in the coal mines. But I found better comparisons with The Corn Is Green to a couple of modern classics, Good Will Hunting and All The Right Moves. Robin Williams reacted the same way in Good Will Hunting when he saw janitor Matt Damon do those math equations. Also John Dall wants to use his writing talents to escape the mines the same way Tom Cruise wants to use a football scholarship to escape the coal mines in Pennsylvania. And Cruise gets a lot of the same opposition that Dall gets from those jealous he has an opportunity to leave the mines.

Though Bette Davis was not nominated for anything, The Corn Is Green got two nominations John Dall for Best Supporting Actor and Joan Lorring for Best Supporting Actress. They lost to James Dunn and Anne Revere respectively.

Dall's career never got the momentum it should have from this film and from Alfred Hitchcock's Rope. He was very much in the celluloid closet and fear of exposure haunted him throughout a life that was given to a lot of substance abuse.

As for Lorring you have not seen too many low class tramps on the screen to match her. Dall gets her pregnant and her condition leads to the climax of the film. Lorring also never quite fulfilled the promise she showed in The Corn Is Green.

The themes of education and literacy are timeless, you can see it in the more modern films I've compared The Corn Is Green too. It's a film not to be missed or acquired if possible. And for Bette Davis's devoted fans, an absolute must. She would not get a part as good as Ms. Moffatt until she did All About Eve.

By now, Bette Davis was having her pick of the type of movies she wanted to make and was known to sacrifice looks for parts that were meaty and difficult. Playing Lily Moffatt must have been a breeze for her, because it allowed her to eliminate all of her grandiose trademark gestures, act in a more paused, restrained way, and let the character's own energy flow out of her and thus dictate how it wanted to convey itself on screen.

Acting against newcomer John Dall she comes off as an equal instead of the experiences actress she by then was: she allows Dall to express himself quite strongly, although at times his Welsh accent wavers in and out. It's too bad, however, that despite this strong debut, Oscar nominated for Supporting Actor, which was followed by ROPE and GUN CRAZY, Dall practically had nothing to hold onto when it came to movies and disappeared for the majority of the Fifties, returning only for SPARTACUS and a smattering of other films.

It's too bad, but one of the many stories of brief careers that make their mark in one or more movies. Speaking of which, Joan Lorring was another actress who took her role and ran with it. For her acting she was awarded, like Dall, a Supporting Actress nomination, but was little seen after 1948. If it weren't for this footnote in her career she'd be all but a forgotten supporting actress; she manages to eclipse Davis in two scenes in the movie, and her exit is also memorable.

Davis probably didn't get a nomination because by now it seemed she could phone in her emotions and play this kind of role in her sleep. Even so, it's a very good role, very understated, not very well remembered (except by her hardcore fans), and the last hit she would have because from 1946 on her movies would start losing money and be of varying quality, that is, until her great comeback as Margo Channing in ALL ABOUT EVE.

I profess that I have a love for good films about teaching. This one stars Bette Davis as Lilly Moffatt, a spinster schoolteacher, whose desires for elevating the minds of young people who are destined to a life of coal mining in a Welsh community, becomes focused on the promising talents of Morgan Evans, a young man who shows a spark of superior intellect.

Miss Davis is well suited to her role, a woman of restrained passions. While watching her, there are moments when I sense similarities with the acting style of Meryl Streep.

The rest of the cast is quite good. John Dall, in his film debut, plays Mr. Evans. It is an inspired performance that earned an Academy Award nomination.

Based upon a true story, TCIG invites comparisons to "My Fair Lady" and, especially, "Spencer's Mountain" in regard to the central story about molding a young mind.

I have one criticism. The singing vocals are so strong that they are distracting. A small group of young, work-weary miners should not sound like the men's chorus at the Met, for example.

Miss Moffatt might be seen by some as selfless in her dedication to higher principles. She denies herself of so much in her pursuit of education. But hers is a selfish campaign for transformation-of a man, a town, perhaps a country. She trades something of lesser value for something of greater value, so she does not sacrifice, even in her final dramatic decision. And it is her pursuit of a greater purpose that gives her story nobility. And the pleasure she finds in her achievements can only be seen as justifiable and virtuous.