Black Fury

Like OUR DAILY BREAD, this film packs a walloping social message. It is intensely dramatic, in large part due to the performance of Paul Muni as a crude, unthinking miner, scarcely able to write his own name. When his sweetheart, Karen Morley, runs away with William Gargan, Muni gets drunk and then staggers out to a miners' meeting. J. Carroll Naish, an agitator trying to get the miners to reorganize their union, is addressing the workers, and Muni dumbly begins to echo his hortatory talk, his voice gradually louder and louder until the miners respond to his wild passion. Ultimately half of them break away from the old union and form a new one under Muni's leadersh...