Ooh that's a great point kingrat! Wow. that's so true. I don't know about you, but I was shocked when she looked over the hill and there was nothing but dirt and machinery. I felt that first blast was so jarring and scary and CLOSE.... (maybe because they are cutting up the woods in our neighborhood for new houses, while FOUR other houses on our block sit empty).... that blasting just killed me. Seeing that beauty that Ida needed so badly in her life just blown away. Ugh. But it did serve to wake that family out of their sleep.Another great moment in Deep Valley is the cut from Ida with her dog lying on the edge of the cliff to our first view of the road construction work. Suddenly we're not deep in the woods any more. This comes as a real shock. You might say that it took the dynamiting and jackhammering of the crew to blast the Saul family out of their prisons. All the main characters are in some kind of prison.
And getting back to that dress sequence - I just loved that scene. Ida was extremely touching and giddy with love, but at the same time trying to hide. She is fairly bursting with it, but cannot tell the whole truth. I am a huge Fay Bainter fan, and the way she played it was very moving to me. It reminded me so much of another scene - one from from Quality Street, and it made the scene in DV even more poignant to me. At the beginning of QS, Fay gives up her wedding gown to her sister, Katharine Hepburn. Fay is an old maid, her lover had left her or been killed before they got married, and she has kept her wedding dress ever since. It's a wonderful, quiet scene, just like this one, full of unspoken sadness and charity. In Deep Valley, I felt that Fay was remembering her own feelings and thoughts when she first loved her her husband, but it was all under the surface. Fay Bainter is really quite incredible, adding quiet depth and undercurrent in all of her films.
