Top 10 Union Movies
Matewan, 1987
"You ain't men to the coal company," Joe Kenehan (Chris Cooper) tells the miners in Matewan, W.Va., in 1920. "You're equipment." Like Marcello Mastroianni in The Organizer, Kenehan knows that a feeling of dignity on the job is a step toward restoring manhood to workers who have been taught to fear the company, which owns their houses and furniture and food, as they fear God. He assembles a ragtag army, including a black miner (James Earl Jones), an Italian laborer (Joe Grifasi) and a young widow (Mary McDonnell) and her 14-year-old son (Will Oldham), a prodigy preacher, who'll update New Testament parables till Jesus sounds like Joe Hill. Writer-director John Sayles — an indie pioneer with Return of the Secaucus 7 and The Brother from Another Planet — made this fierce period film, with a huge cast, for only $4 million, a budget that was met under the supposed financial restrictions of a full union crew. No less than Kenehan, Sayles was a demon organizer with a beatific dream.