USA, 1987
Color, 132 min.
WRITING CREDITS: John SAYLES
CINEMATOGRAPHY: Haskell WEXLER
EDITING: Sonya POLONSKY
PROD. DESIGN: Nora CHAVOOSHIAN
ART DIRECTION: Dan BISHOP
SETS: Anamarie MICHNEVICH, Leslie POPE
MUSIC: Mason DARING.
CAST: Chris COOPER, James Earl JONES, Mary McDONNEL, Will OLDHAM, David STRATHAIRN, Ken JENKINS, Gordon CLAPP, Kevin TIGHE, John SAYLES, C.E. LIVELY, Josh MOSTEL and more.
PRIZES: INDEPENDENT SPIRIT AWARD, 1988 and POLITICAL FILM SOCIETY, 1988.
In the history of the working class and the organization of unions in the U.S.A., the incidents portrayed in this film occur chronologically after those related in Travis WILKERSON’s AN INJURY TO ONE. What happened to the IWW after the Anaconda Massacre and the Palmer Raids can be surmised by the appearance in Mingo County, West Virginia, of a Joe KENEHAN, a self-declared former Wobbly who has not relinquished his ideas and his urge to organize in “One Big Union", the struggling proletariat of America. Matewan is the location of a coal mine in the Appalachian Mountains where the company owns not only the precious mineral but also the main store, the only “hotel” and everything else ( including the miners, who are not treated as human beings but as mere objects). The pitiful working conditions of the miners lead to an attempted strike that the mine owners try to fight by hiring scabs within southern Afro-American communities or in the mass of Italian immigrants (for once, in an American film, Italian characters speak authentic Italian and not the caricature of it to which Hollywood accustomed us).
The action starts around the train which is headed for Matewan (in reality Thurmond, West Virginia): Joe feels impotent and skeptical when he witness an organized beating of the so called “scabs”. One figure emerges among them, the charismatic “Few Clothes” Johnson (convincingly and masterfully played by James Earl Jones), brave and strong. Joe’s mission will be to explain the involved parties that the workers should not accept passively being played against each others by the bosses, who should instead be considered the real and only enemy.
‘Few Clothes’ points out vigorously that he has been called a “Nigger” many times but that he would not accept being called a “scab”. When he was hired nobody told him he was to replace, or enter in competition with, the strikers. He will do whatever it takes to avoid a pay cut. Immigrants, here typified by Italians, are in the same situation: they want work, not competition.
Little by little, all are won over to the cause of unionization and that is confirmed by a choir of Italian protest songs. Music, by the way, plays a great role in the film: at first we have three separate instruments playing three different tunes and styles. At the end, the same instruments play together the same music together.
John Sayles himself wrote some of the lyrics.
Sayles, besides being a film director, is also a fiction writer. One of his qualities here is the distribution of the roles. At first we think there will be only a protagonist (the union organizer) and an antagonist (the hired gun), but we discover, progressively, that they do not fill the main roles because while the plot develops, many more characters play an important part in the events and are psychologically, sociologically or otherwise defined and developed. Besides the roles already mentioned, we have Elma (the landlady), her 15 year old son Danny, the so-called “soft” preacher who provides contrast the hard-shelled preacher (played with deliberate exaggeration by John Sayles himself), Sid the Sheriff, Cabel the Mayor, the widow who spends time at the railway station watching trains and courting men, and others.
There are some moments of relaxation too, besides the music: one is the women’s argument on polenta (the way the Italian Rosaria wants it) as opposed to cornmeal (defended by the Virginian housewife).
The film explores slowly all aspects of rural and communitarian life of the ‘20s in Shenandoah Valley: the bigotry, the greed, misery, solidarity, frustration, aggression, betrayal, etc.
Whether the narration is historical or fictional, it is neither irrelevant nor too important. The facts are believable and close to truth. Someone (“rremon” on ImDB) even wrote that actual conditions of life were even worse than those depicted in the film. Whatever details have been added by the fantasy of the author, there was indeed a Matewan Massacre on May 19, 1920, which resulted in 11 deaths.

The most interesting historico-political element, perhaps, is that both the Sheriff and the Mayor defended the law (which they represent, after all) and not the privilege, as in similar cases,up to, until and still occurs today.
In real life the Mayor is killed in the battle but the Sheriff survives. Not for long, however, because he will be killed by goons the following year in punishment for having opposed the Company’s desires and interests. And, apparently, no one was arrested for this crime.
What is Sayles telling us 80 years later?
The first lesson is probably unity of people, beyond racial and nationalistic prejudices.
Second, the need for democratic workers’ organizations.
Third, direct action to insure survival and to defend human rights.
At that time, this type of selfdefense required weapons, which was even encouraged by the Sheriff. By what means would these miners defend themselves today,80 years after the events in Matewan?
Pietro Ferrua