Black Fury (1935)

Beautiful, moving film.

Tells a fascinating and unsettling true story, and does so well, without pretending to have all the answers.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

The tone of this movie is interesting -- the stakes are both dramatic and high, but it's balanced with a lot of fun, tongue and cheek dialogue.

If you can't understand what the lead actor is saying half the time, it's kind of hard to enjoy the film! That's what I encountered trying to watch this as Paul Muni, as a Polish coal mine worker, speaks in such a heavy accent I couldn't decipher what he was saying. It gets to be a frustrating experience. If this would come out on DVD with English subtitles, I'd be glad to give it another look.Muni, almost always a fascinating actor, plays good-guy Joe Radek, a Pennsylvania coal miner who is used by his bosses to help them break the union. (This film is very pro-union, pro-working man.). They got Barton MacLane to play the heavy, something he was always good at doing. MacLane played the company boss. I always laugh at how these billionaire film makers always try to make management or the rich guys the evil ones. Maybe it's a guilty conscience from all the money they have made, but I see them more as big hypocrites.However, I find no fault in any movie trying to help the coal miners who did, in fact, had it bad and deserved better. It was dirty job and a dangerous one. It still is, as far as I know, but conditions have to be a whole lot better than a hundred years ago so don't misinterpret what I said earlier: in many cases, management was "the bad guy" way back then. It's just that, in most cases, it has been the opposite case the last 50 years and now it's tough to be sympathetic to union causesAnyway, Muni plays an interesting guy who you have to root for....if you can understand what he is saying with that accent.

Never realized that Paul Muni, (Joe Radek) played in a film concerning miners in Pennsylvania and gave such an outstanding performance beyond anything I realized he had accomplished in his long career on the silver screen. In this film Joe Radek is an immigrant to this country, however, he is very clever in many ways and seeks justice for his fellow workers in the coal mine in which the town people work. Karen Morley,(Anna Novak) gives a great supporting role to this film and really loves Joe Radek and what he is trying to accomplish. The town is controlled by the coal mine owners and Barton MacLane,( McGree )along with William Gargan,(Slim Johnson/Company Police bully the people in the town along with J Carrol Nash,(Steve Croner) who all work against the miners and control their living conditions. There is a big problem trying to establish a Labor Union and there is a constant battle between the very poor and rich people of the community. Paul Muni gave the best performance I have ever seen in this Classic 1935 film, don't miss this picture.

Paul Muni, David Thomson once wrote, was the '30s' idea of a great actor: He never looked the same twice. Here he's a hail-fellow-well-met Eastern European immigrant coal miner in a dreary Pennsylvania burg, deceived by union busters and weighed down by a ten-ton accent. Indeed the screenplay seldom rises above a fifth-grade literacy level, the better to illustrate the goodheartedness of these poor but honest laborers. But five minutes of Muni, and you've seen the whole performance -- a Zorba-the-miner "life force" who yells all his lines and sounds unfortunately like Steve Martin's wild-and-crazy-guy character from Saturday Night Live in the '70s.Warners does come up with a convincingly grimy set and a capable stock-company supporting cast, but the dramaturgy is connect-the-dots. One miner shouts and sways the whole crowd, then another, then another -- what a gullible bunch this must be. The evil cops and management figures are so absurdly evil that nuance is lost. The third act does whip up to an exciting blow-up-the-mine climax, but then it's resolved in headline montages, as if Warners suddenly ran out of money, or film. And Michael Curtiz -- I didn't think this fine director was capable of this -- stages the crowd scenes clumsily, shifting point of view confusingly and slapping the mise-en-scene together hard, with loud music. Certainly the studio is on the side of the angels, arguing for a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, and as a '30s sociological curio the movie is not without interest. But Muni's monotonous bluster and an elementary script combine to create a cinematic cave-in.

In 'Black Fury', Paul Muni gives one of his best performances, and also appears on screen in one of his more plausible make-ups. This time he plays a Slavic immigrant, uneducated but keenly intelligent, working in an American coal mine. Muni's hair is dyed blond, yet looks realistic, and his own Eastern European facial features work with this characterisation ... not against it, as they did for some of his other roles. The film also features a fine performance from John Qualen, a prolific character actor whose film appearances were often marred by unconvincing and unnecessary foreign accents of the "yumpin' yiminy!" sort. In 'Black Fury', Qualen's flavour-of-the-month accent is less obtrusive than usual, and it actually works for the character he plays: a Polish-American miner.Joe Radek (Muni) is a miner in a 'company town', where all the labourers are poorly-paid and live in squalid shanties. Radek and his fellow miners work in extremely dangerous conditions. The company that owns the mine also owns all the local businesses, and the local police force also work for the mining company. The cops have no interest in justice: they're bullies whose only concern is to keep the locals quiet and subservient to the company. The head cop is a slimy sadist named McGee, well-played by Barton MacLane. Radek's buddy Shemanski (Qualen) gets drunk one night and makes the mistake of criticising company policy: staggering home that night, he has a fatal 'accident' arranged by McGee's goons.To call attention to various grievances, Radek fills the mineshaft with dynamite. He packs several days' worth of food for himself, then he takes McGee hostage at gunpoint and brings him into the mine. Radek chains McGee to the pit face, slightly out of reach of Radek's food supply. If Radek's demands aren't met, he's going to blow up the mine ... with himself and McGee inside. After they've been in the mine for several days, there's one harrowing shot of the starving McGee chained to the wall, begging Radek for food. The film ends with one of those slam-bang action climaxes that Warner Bros did so well, spiced with some social commentary that doesn't get too preachy.The film boasts an excellent supporting cast, filled with actors who are (mostly) more obscure than usual, which helps us to immerse ourselves in the action. Karen Morley, quietly beautiful, gives a fine performance, and Michael Curtiz (a very underrated director) does his usual superlative work.'Black Fury' is based on a story by Michael A. Musmanno, a Pennsylvania lawyer of Italian descent. Late in his life, Musmanno devoted several decades to writing a book called 'Columbus *WAS* First' (his emphasis), which purported to prove that no European explorers reached the Americas before Columbus. Musmanno's claims for Columbus have long since been disproven, but 'Black Fury' is an excellent film. I'll rate this movie 9 points out of 10.Trivia note: Shortly after this movie was released, Warner Brothers released a Loony Toon starring Porky Pig as a hunter who had a dog named Black Fury. What a shameless plug!