Black Fury

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.

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!

"Black Fury" was the only time Paul Muni worked with Michael Curtiz. Potentially, this film could have been great but it is far from that. Muni wasn't very keen on acting in films, his preference was always going to be the theatre. He wasn't able to tone down his acting style for the cinema for the most part and he often appeared to be playing a caricature. He is guilty of this in the film "Black Fury." He is too theatrical in his facial expressions, his body language etc. Paul Muni plays a simple but honest coal miner who unwittingly becomes involved in a bitter dispute between the workers and the management. Muni, along with other miners, is subjected to intimidation. Barton MacLane is cast as a villain (he usually was) who is sent to destroy the livelihood of all the coal miners in this small community. Technically, the film is a disappointment. It is all too obvious that the sets representing the town in question are all on a soundstage. The sets don't look real and the direction from Michael Curtiz tends to suffer. The story itself is actually quite good and the film maintains a steady pace. The climax is also effective.

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.

During the Thirties Warner Brothers had the reputation of being the working class studio and it was films like Black Fury that made for Warner Brothers that reputation. It was rare indeed to see another studio take stories about ordinary working people. Mostly they concentrated on the middle and upper classes because film was a form of escapism during the Depression. Black Fury coming out as it did in the middle of the New Deal was a timely reminder of the difficulties organized labor faced. Not coincidentally 1935 was the year that the Wagner Labor Relations Act was passed, an effort finally by the government to give labor some kind of equal footing with management. The need of the Wagner Act was to correct some of the abuses shown in films like Black Fury.

Paul Muni plays happy go lucky immigrant coal miner Joe Radek. A man admittedly who works hard and no one thinks of as any kind of brain. He gets used good and proper by the company to stir up the miners so they will strike and give the company an excuse to lock out the union and bring in scabs.

What you see with those miners living on subsistent wages in company towns was taken right from current headlines. It may be ancient history to us now, but it was very real for those people back in the day. The Pinkertons as represented by brutal and corrupt company policeman Barton MacLane had an unsavory reputation as strikebreakers and enforcers for management. That too is no exaggeration.

Muni, aided and abetted by former girl friend Karen Morley now seeing the error of some of her ways, sees what a chump he's been and takes some real direct action against the employers. It's spectacular I'll tell you that.

Though his acting style seems to have not worn well with some, not with me mind you, Muni was given a really rare tribute that year. His performance as Joe Radek was the second time a performer had a sustained write-in campaign for him for an acting Oscar. He finished second in the balloting to Victor McLaglen for The Informer and ahead of Mutiny of the Bounty nominees, Clark Gable, Charles Laughton, and Franchot Tone. The following year the Academy banned write-ins and that's been so ever since. Of course the following year Muni won his Oscar for The Story of Louis Pasteur.

We've moved on in America from an industrial to an information based society and films like Black Fury are now part of history. But it's a history we should not forget.