Matewan (1987), written and directed by John Sayles, is not just a great labor film but a great movie period: gripping plot, memorable dialogue, great acting, convincing setting and atmosphere.
The tragedy is based on the historical Matewan Massacre of 1920 as are the pro-union Mayor and Police Chief Sid Hatfield (David Straithairn) - a relative of the famous feudists, company spy/agent provocateur CE Lively, and “Few Clothes” Johnson, called ”a John Henry of the mines” by Sayles, played with huge authority by the great James Earl Jones. Three central characters are fictional: ex-IWW organizer Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper), the protagonist, boy preacher/miner Danny (Will Oldham) whose older self is the narrator, and Kevin Tighe as gun thug Hickey, dripping with contempt for the miners and their families, a truly memorable villain. Matewan had an extra impact on me because Chris Cooper, as Joe the organizer, from some angles resembled Mike Harrington (my own working class hero) who was then battling cancer.
Sayles shows conflict on many levels – physical between the miners and the Baldwin-Felts company gun thugs, between the local West Virginia miners and the Black and Italian miners imported as strikebreakers, and at the deepest level, a struggle for Danny’s soul between the miners vendetta culture and Joe’s insistence that only nonviolent solidarity, uniting the three disparate communities of workers, can prevail against the armed might of the bosses.
The miners won the battle of Matewan, but lost the war, as Joe warned in the film, and Mother Jones herself in reality, before the catastrophic battle of Blair Mountain a year later. It took the United Mine Workers (UMW) over a decade to recover, after UMW leader John L. Lewis hired the socialist dissidents Powers Hapgood and John Brophy as organizers.
Sayles explained in Thinking in Pictures, his book on making Matewan, his effort to depict not just the leading characters but an entire community. To do so, Sayles makes even the minor characters complex.
Matewan opens on Sephus, leader of the local miners, crouching and coughing in a little-ease mine tunnel, setting a symbolic long fuse to dynamite a wall of coal, as Danny runs around telling the miners the company cut wages. Then Joe, coming in on a train, watches as a freight car opens and Black miners from Alabama are ordered out, to be met with an assault by local miners yelling “scabs!” Next scene, the mine owner dictates to the black miners the feudal terms of the company town contract: all wages in scrip, deductions for travel and equipment, firing w/o pay for any trouble.
In a great scene, Few Clothes enters a union meeting, reponds to “go home nigger! goddam scab” with “I been called nigger, cant help the way white folks is, but I aint never been called no scab!” (Black miners in Alabama began unionizing around 1900). Joe tells the miners “This man is a worker! They got you fightin white against colored, native against foreign, hollow against hollow, when you know there aint but two sides in this world – them that work and them that dont.” [Thanks Dbug for posting the clip of this scene in your comment!]
Before the final shootout, Sephus epitomizes the tragedy: “you’re still after that one big union, (but) we can’t see past this holler.”
[A version of this review ran last year on DSA's Democratic Left blog.]