Barbara Kopple's
Harlan County, U.S.A. was a shocking movie to see
in its original 1977 release, especially if you were a city boy like me. Not
shocking in language or sexuality as movies can be, but shocking in a much more
chilling way. After the New Deal, the War on Poverty, OSHA and all sorts of other
social progress, here was the gripping documentary of dirt-poor coal miners in
eastern Kentucky striking for something close to a living wage and basic medical
benefits, in a struggle complete with gunfire, workers' quarters lacking running
water and rampant doses of black lung disease. It was like something out of the
1930s was somehow still going on in the 1970s.
Part of what made
Harlan County, U.S.A. so chilling, and what continues to
make it unusually dramatic, is the commitment of the moviemaking from Kopple,
who'd worked at the Maysles brothers' production company and had been one of the
dozen or so members of the Winterfilm collective that had made another enduring
political documentary,
Winter Soldier. Kopple and her crew immerse
themselves in the community of Brookside, Kentucky and make you feel as if you're
on the 5 a.m. picket lines, in the meetings with the miners' wives' "Booster
Club" and on the front porches where old-timers tell of primitive mining
conditions and past strikes. You don't doubt these tales or the urgency of the
struggle, because Kopple opens the movie with a very memorable sequence in which
cinematographer Hart Perry's camera goes into a mile-deep mine with a group of
workers, and we see the dank, noisy, 40-inch high shaft of space in which the
miners scrape ore off the walls and send it back up to ground level. While it's a
solid industrial montage reminiscent of the nifty seafood-plant beginning of
Fritz Lang's
Clash by Night, it also provides the dramatic context of
everything that follows.
The miners in
Harlan County, U.S.A. had voted to join the United Mine
Workers of America, but the mine operators (Eastover Mining and its parent
company, Duke Power) wouldn't recognize the contract, hence the strike. In
addition to the sequence with old timers, in which Kopple fills in background
about Harlan County mines, she also includes a sequence on the strife within the
UMW that led to the emergence of a new union president, Frank Miller, shortly
before the Eastover miners voted for union representation. So, after introducing
us to the harsh conditions inside and outside the mine,
Harlan County,
U.S.A. gradually broadens the context of the strike for us. It's not just a
Harlan County struggle or a Kentucky struggle. It's an
American struggle.
Of course, the movie focuses throughout on individuals among the strikers,
articulate and passionate folks like Lois Scott, Jerry Johnson and Bessie Cornett
Parker (who, it turns out, is Lois' daughter). There are some priceless moments
here: after tensions escalate, Lois pulling a gun out from her bra for the
camera; when a group of miners go to New York to picket Duke Power's
shareholders' meeting, Jerry having a sidewalk conversation with a young New York
City cop who's amazed at the paltry wages and benefits the miners get; Bessie
getting up in court after the women are arrested for lying in the road to block
scabs' vehicles, and defiantly telling the judge, "You say the laws were made for
us. The laws are not made for the working people in this country." (The women's
essential role in the strike is something a male moviemaker might not have played
up as much as Kopple does; it's one of the best things about the movie.)
And on the other side of the battle, there's head strike-breaker Basil Collins,
who's like the most ornery Ben Johnson heavy to the Nth degree (think
Kid
Blue if you've seen it). In one of the movie's money shots, the camera
catches him brandishing his gun during the pre-dawn darkness as shots fly as he
leads a convoy of scabs' cars to the mine. Moments later, Kopple and crew are
attacked by Collins' thugs.
Harlan County, U.S.A. makes no bones about being on the miners' side in
the struggle. What enlightened person
wouldn't be? We hear the mine
operators at press conferences and the stockholders meeting, and it would be hard
for anyone to rationalize sympathy for the bosses' point-of-view, which is
clearly to sacrifice workers' safety and health for more profit. Although the
Harlan County strike is ultimately successful, any victory is bittersweet and
Kopple's movie leaves us feeling that the struggle definitely continues after the
end credits roll. She personally continued to document that struggle by
co-directing 1991's
American Dream, which chronicled another strike by
workers, this time at a Hormel meatpacking plant in Minnesota. But by the time of
the Hormel strike, the Reagan administration's deregulation had led to much
corporate consolidation and a power shift away from workers and to corporations
(like
Harlan County, U.S.A.,
American Dream won a Best Documentary
Oscar). The struggles detailed in those movies continue today, and heavily inform
the debate over immigration reform, since merger-created mega-corporations such
as large meatpackers, which no longer have deep ties to the communities in which
they have plants, have chosen to employ a revolving door of transient, unskilled
immigrants who can be treated poorly and bullied, rather than a stable force of
skilled American workers who might unionize and demand more wages, benefits and
rights.
The new
Harlan County, U.S.A. DVD is a typically generous Criterion
Collection disc. In addition to an audio commentary by Kopple and editor Nancy
Baker, there's also an informative 22-minute making-of documentary, an interview
with bluegrass singer-songwriter Hazel Dickens (who has several songs in the
movie), footage from a panel discussion about the movie at the 2005 Sundance Film
Festival, an interview with admirer John Sayles (whose fictional coal-mining
movie,
Matewan, was influenced by
Harlan County, U.S.A.) and about
20 minutes of deleted scenes culled from the hours of additional footage Kopple
and crew shot. These extras convey such tidbits as Kopple's dedication to winning
the trust of her subjects (in a 1992 interview, she told me she thought of
herself as a sympathetic bartender in this regard) and the fact that the movie
started out to be about the power struggle for UMW leadership, but that the
detour to cover Harlan County's strike eventually became the more important story
to tell. Did it ever.
For more information about
Harlan County, U.S.A., visit
The Criterion Collection. To order
Harlan County, U.S.A., go to
TCM Shopping.
.
by Paul Sherman
