Matewan

James Earl Jones died last year, and when TCM did their programming salute to him, it gave me the chance to record a movie that I had seen pop up here and there over the years, but had never actually watched. That movie is the historical drama Matewan.

Matewan is based on the true story of the Battle of Matewan, part of a series of coal mining disputes in West Virginia in the early 1920s. The mine owners hold all the cards economically, and as a result are able to get away with offering little more than lousy conditions to the locals who work the mine. They've been thinking about forming a union, especially once the mine owners effectively lower the wages, but the mine owners can just bring new workers in, and we see a train of such replacement workers as the movie opens, with blacks like "Few Clothes" Johnson (James Earl Jones) and eventually Italian immigrants who speak little enough English that they're easy to exploit.

Into all of this comes union organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper). He's much like the Ron Liebman character in Norma Rae, although even more here, his involvement with the union has to be kept a secret or else the mine owners are really going to be angry and place Kenehan's life in danger. Still, a man seemingly without a job looking to stay in a company town like this is bound to be noticed, so he tries to be discreet staying in the boarding house run by Elma Radnor with her son Danny, one of those would-be child preachers who gives radical sermons about the local situation which are also a way of informing people rather obliquely what's going on.

The mine owners know something's up, so they send in a couple of detectives, Griggs and Hickey, to try to find out exactly what the deal is, along with trying to get an informant in among the mine workers. Kinehan, for his part, is no dummy, and having seen how the mine owners have brought in replacement workers, sets about trying to get the various sets of miners realize that they all have to be in it together. After all, if the replacements start disliking the conditions, the mine owners can bring in a third set of workers.

Matters escalate when the mine owners attempt to evict the families of striking miners, as the houses are technically owned by the mining company. The mayor and police chief, who are on the side of the miners, attempt to stave this off by pointing out that it might not be legal to just tell the miners they're being evicted and that they have to get court-ordered eviction notices. Some of the miners decide to decamp for the forested hills above town as this gets them off company-owned properties, although being in the hills isn't the safest thing either.

History tells us that tensions are eventually going to boil over, although how exactly that happens and what the consequences are are things that I'll leave to the viewers to find out for themselves. Suffice it to say that Matewan is a very well-made movie. It was, unsurprisingly, a hit with the critics, although perhaps equally unsurprisingly, it wasn't particuarly successful at the box office. I'd put that down partly to the subject material, and partly down to the fact that Matewan has a pretty slow build-up. Despite the box office failure, Matewan is a movie that you should see if you get the chance.