Black Fury

The fabulous Paul Muni gives another wonderful performance in this 1935 film.

With a genuine Slavic accent, Muni is superb as a coal miner who loses his girl (Karen Morley) to a company Policeman and goes on a drinking binge as a result. It is at this point that a gangster organization tries to create chaos within the union and Muni becomes their perfect foil.

J. Carrol Naish is excellent as the worker who works for this unholy organization.

Naturally, Muni's best friend is killed in a clash with company police and Muni, now sober, vows revenge.

Morley returns to Muni just in time as he goes down into the mine and starts blowing the place up. It's at this point that the film starts to go down, but with Muni's performance and the problems shown of what the coal miners had to endure plus the dishonesty in trying to break the union, all make for a very good film.

Joe Radek (Paul Muni) is a simple-minded, hardworking immigrant coal miner who dreams of buying a farm and settling down with his girl, Anna (Karen Morley). But when Anna leaves him for another man, Joe falls apart and takes to drinking. In Joe's current state of mind, he's manipulated by a union buster (J. Carrol Naish) into revolting against the mining company. This has disastrous results for the laborers but Joe determines to set things right by any means necessary.

Paul Muni's only film with director Michael Curtiz. As was often the case with Muni, his performance can be seen either as brilliant or 100% ham. Whichever it is, I enjoyed it a lot. The cast is full of reliable Warner Bros contract players that are always fun to watch, especially great character actor J. Carrol Naish. It's not surprising this is from WB, the 1930s home of movies about the working class. Certainly interesting from a historical and sociological perspective as a view of labor issues in Depression-era America. It's also fine dramatic entertainment. Based in part on a true story of a 1929 incident at a mine in Imperial Pennsylvania.

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.

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.