People of the Cumberland

Before we hoot this one off the stage, we ought to remember just what was happening at this time, at the low point of the Depression, and if this film seems over-emotive, many small-town audiences would have felt profoundly emotional about their miserable lot, and would have welcomed this powerful appeal on behalf of the labor unions.

Dramatising the danger and hardship of the miner's life always grips the attention, and few would fail to sympathise with these damaged individuals, left to their own devices by the employer class when things turned ugly after the Wall Street crash.

It is when we analyse the solutions on offer that we start to detect dubious messages behind the outwardly reasonable demands for better pay and conditions. Local leaders are talking in terms of a "union town" and building a new school to teach children "to think in common and to act together". There is something of the Hitler Youth about these massed rallies with young men officially swearing loyalty to the cause. This was also the year when Chaplin started work on The Great Dictator, and the film's ending replicates his idiotic marxist sermon to a notable degree. Meanwhile, Eleanor Roosevelt was working-off her deep private unhappiness by playing Lady Bountiful, re-building a mining town in the same spirit - with disastrous results - while the young Elia Kazan, assistant director on this film, had joined the American Communist Party, which he would later have to explain away in some embarrassment to the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC).

There is a rather unconvincing attempt to flatter the workers as kinsfolk of the original pioneers ("a tough breed"), as though the employers were not also from the same stock. The conclusion must be that the American people are far too entrepreneurial and risk-taking to welcome the Russian-bear embrace of the unions, whom they have never truly taken to their hearts, with or without their sinister mafia puppet-masters.