Matewan | Matewan

Matewan | Matewan

DVDs:

Matewan

	Matewan average customer review:based on 65 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Matewan

The DVD from amazon.ca (Canada) is fine, anamorphic widescreen and a good transfer as well. The sound is 2.0 Dolby digital though the disc has no subtitles, which is a bit of a shame due to the sometimes strong 'classic southern' accents.
But the picture is good and the sound is not too bad either.

Don't wait, just buy the Canadian one. Till now it's the only DVD I had to buy from amazon.ca, the rest all here on amazon.com!

Great film by the way; a must see and must have.

Matewan

While parts of this movie are historically accurate, the lead character, Joe Kenehan and many of the events surrounding him are fiction. Writer and Director, John Sayles' communist sympathy is obvious. His Joe Kenehan is depicted as a labor pacifist. In reality, the communists in the labor movement of the 1920's were anything but pacifist. My Dad, (1893-1975), a sometime union organizer and always loyal union man, had absolutely no use for the International Workers of the World (I.W.W., Wobblies) or other communist front groups. To a man, they agitated for violent takeover of the mines.

It was providential that ordinary miners caught between reactionary coal operators and their thugs (Baldwin-Phelps, Pinkerton, and garden variety toughs) on the one hand, and the communists pushing for violent revolution on the other, were eventually able to work their way through to collective bargaining with the coal operators.

The United Mine Workers, under John L. Lewis, (elected President in 1920), was able to marginalize the communists while at the same time struggling against the operators. Eventually, the coal operators saw the futility of hiring detective agents to counter union organizers and the violence subsided.

The turning point was the July 1921 assassination of unarmed Sid Hatfield on neighboring McDowell County Courthouse steps where he arrived in response to a summons. In the wake of all the violence, the people finally recoiled at this breathtaking disregard for the law. After the assassination, the union organizers gained strength and upped the ante, culminating in the "Battle of Blair Mountain", where 10,000 miners faced off against the US Army. As cooler heads prevailed, the miners took up the United Mine Workers cry "A fair day's pay for a fair day's work" instead of calls for class warfare promoted by the radicals. When these developments became clear, public support swung to the miners. The coal operator's resistance crumbled and the United Mine Workers triumphed.

The depiction of the Baldwin-Phelps agents is fairly accurate. The eviction of the miner from the Company house is right on target. My parents were evicted in just this way. Sid Hatfield is correctly shown as sympathetic to the union but except for local issues, he was essentially apolitical. He and Mayor Testerman were just doing the job they were elected to do. The evictions of the miners (constituents) in Matewan were illegal because the Baldwin-Phelps agents did not have proper eviction papers.

Evictions were common throughout the coal fields, especially when there was labor strife. My parents were evicted in 1919 by Baldwin-Phelps agents because some union literature turned up in the mine and Dad was accused of putting it out. He was fired and evicted by Company detectives the same day, but that's another story ....

In summary, the movie is well done and worth your time. As long as one is aware of, and can get past John Sayles' shaping of the story to fit his Marxist views, it is an entertaining and educational movie.

Remember, the real pacifists were Sid Hatfield and Mayor Testerman. They tried to uphold the law.

P.S. To understand the mission of the Industrial Workers of the World, look up the I.W.W. preamble and constitution on the internet. Also, look up John L. Lewis. You'll probably be surprised to learn he was a lifelong Republican!

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An American indie classic

Matewan was a pleasant surprise. The subject matter cried out 'dull but worthy' and John Sayles is distinctly hit-and-miss when dealing with historical subjects, as the problematic Eight Men Out underlines, but this is quite a superb movie with a scope well beyond its budget. Almost a slow burn western as a miner's strike leads slowly but inevitably to a violent shootout between the railroad detectives and the local lawman and strikers, it's an involving and intelligent piece of work. That's not to say it's without problems: it perhaps overstates Kevin Tighe's villainous stupidity (could he really have laughed his way through a sermon without seeing the relevance?), a scene where the white, black and Italian miners set aside their differences through music feels too Hollywood, and Haskell Wexler over diffuses the light a couple of times in that irritating late-70s-early-80s way in his otherwise exemplary cinematography. Sayles briefly offers another one of his stomach-turning cameos as a preacher, but at least he's only in it for a minute or two (unlike his genuinely irritating Ring Lardner impersonation in Eight Men Out) and he's on much more solid grounds with his impressive ensemble cast - a young Chris Cooper on excellent form, Mary McDonnell before she got irritating, James Earl Jones before he stopped acting, David Strathairn, Bob Gunton and Will Oldham among them. You get the sense that Sayles likes his characters and cares for them. It's that which prevents the film from slipping into easy dogma and posturing and which makes it still seem surprising and shocking when the inevitable violence breaks out. And it's that that helps you overlook the flaws and embrace its many strengths.

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Matewan

The movie was very good,and educational,however the sound was
poor.I had to turn the surround sound all the way up and still
could not hear some parts of it.Ihad seen this film on TV before
and the sound was fine on TV but not on the DVD.

reviews: 1, 2, 3, 4, page 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12, 13

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