Reel Classics: ‘Harlan County USA’

Harlan County USA is the sec­ond Reel Classic — Kentucky Connection. It is an Academy Award-win­ning doc­u­men­tary, direct­ed and pro­duced by Barbara Kopple. This film was com­plet­ed ear­ly in her long career as a doc­u­men­tary filmmaker. 

Kopple, a New York native, attend­ed col­lege and was study­ing polit­i­cal sci­ence and clin­i­cal psy­chol­o­gy. However, her inter­ests shift­ed to film, and she attend­ed the School of Visual Arts. She worked as an edi­tor, pho­tog­ra­ph­er, and sound oper­a­tor on var­i­ous doc­u­men­taries, includ­ing Gimme Shelter about the Rolling Stones’ Altamont con­cert, and even­tu­al­ly set up her own pro­duc­tion com­pa­ny. Harlan County USA was her first effort as a director.

The sto­ry focus­es on the 1973 min­ers’ strike at the Brookside Mine in Harlan County, Kentucky. The mine was owned by the Duke Power Company, based in North Carolina. The work­ers were demand­ing safer work­ing con­di­tions, fair labor prac­tices, and decent wages. They were being assist­ed by rep­re­sen­ta­tives from the United Mine Workers of America (UMWA).

At the time, many of the work­ers were liv­ing in com­pa­ny-owned homes with no run­ning water or util­i­ties. In the film, Kopple notes that while Duke Power saw prof­its increase by 170% in a year, the work­ers were offered only a 4% raise.

When Barbara Kopple and her crew from New York arrived at the pick­et lines, they were not imme­di­ate­ly accept­ed by the strik­ing work­ers and their fam­i­lies. Kopple and her crew spent time with the work­ers and their fam­i­lies, stay­ing through­out the strike. They went on the lines with their cam­eras and were also the recip­i­ents of threats from the company’s “scabs” and “gun thugs.” They became trust­ed allies of the work­ers and fam­i­ly mem­bers, attend­ing and film­ing the orga­niz­ing meetings.

The film’s style was to have the words and actions of those being filmed tell the sto­ry, rather than rely­ing sole­ly on nar­ra­tion. Barbara Kopple also believed that hav­ing the crew with cam­eras there on the lines helped reduce the threat of vio­lence, as often the “gun thugs” would hide their weapons when they saw they were being filmed. She also pro­vid­ed some his­to­ry of the efforts at union­iz­ing the miners. 

Through inter­views with retired min­ers and sup­port­ers, she ref­er­ences the 1930s, when min­ers stood up to the com­pa­nies. Those efforts gave rise to the phrase “Bloody Harlan.” A well-known orga­niz­ing song came from that peri­od, writ­ten by a very young Florence Reece and updat­ed in 1931: “Which Side Are You On?” Various artists have record­ed ver­sions of that song, includ­ing Pete Seeger, Ani DiFranco, Natalie Merchant, and Billy Bragg.

Barbara Kopple uti­lizes music in the film to empha­size the mes­sage of defi­ance and the hard­ships of the work­ers and their fam­i­lies. Fourteen songs appear in the film, sev­er­al by Appalachian singer Hazel Dickens. The music reflects the cul­ture and depicts the strug­gles of the min­ers and their fam­i­lies. One review­er described the songs as “work­ing-class musi­cal anthems.” Titles include “Dark as a Dungeon,” “Come All You Coal Miners,” “Cold Blooded Murder,” and “They’ll Never Keep Us Down.”

The 13-month-long strike even­tu­al­ly comes to an end after the trag­ic death of one of the strik­ing min­ers. He was shot and killed dur­ing a con­fronta­tion and left behind a wife and an infant child. Kopple filmed some very mov­ing scenes from the funer­al of the deceased miner. 

After that inci­dent, the com­pa­ny and the min­ers agreed on a set­tle­ment. Jerry Johnson, one of the strik­ing min­ers, gave cred­it to Barbara Kopple and her film crew: “The cam­eras prob­a­bly saved a bunch of shoot­ing. I don’t think we’d have won it with­out the film crew. If the film crew had­n’t been sym­pa­thet­ic to our cause, we would’ve lost. Thank God for them; thank God they’re on our side.”

In a 2015 inter­view, Barbara Kopple was asked whether she felt in dan­ger dur­ing film­ing. She stat­ed that she learned that the leader of the strike­break­ers, Basil Collins, want­ed to hire some­one to shoot her. There is a scene in the film where guns are fired at the strik­ers, and Kopple and her crew are knocked down and beaten. 

They spent eigh­teen months in Harlan doc­u­ment­ing the events around the strike.

Another impor­tant attribute of the film is the focus on the women and their involve­ment. Kopple films sev­er­al orga­niz­ing meet­ings led by the strik­ers’ wives and fam­i­ly mem­bers. The women have their own pick­et line as well. The film depicts their frus­tra­tion with hav­ing wit­nessed end­less exploita­tion and the loss of their loved ones to Black Lung. 

A judge orders a lim­it to the num­ber of min­ers allowed to pick­et, and the women orga­nize their own effort to block scabs and protest. One of the lead­ers of the effort was Lois Scott. She appears in sev­er­al scenes, encour­ag­ing and plead­ing with folks to get involved and stand up for what they believe in. She was not hes­i­tant to chas­tise oth­ers for not par­tic­i­pat­ing in the effort. An essay­ist from the Criterion site described her as “a charis­mat­ic agi­ta­tor who embod­ies the film’s most trou­bling, and endur­ing, ques­tion: how to fight against cor­po­rate intim­i­da­tion with­out jeop­ar­diz­ing the goals or moral cap­i­tal of the union cause.”

Roger Ebert wrote in a review that the film is “the sto­ry of a min­ers’ strike in Kentucky where the com­pa­ny employed armed goons to escort scabs into the mines, and the most effec­tive pick­eters were the min­ers’ wives — artic­u­late, indomitable, courageous.”

Critical response to the film has been pos­i­tive. The review­er for The Washington Post wrote that Kopple “has emerged with a stir­ring, reveal­ing tes­ta­ment to the courage, tenac­i­ty and dig­ni­ty of Appalachian men and women whose liveli­hood depends on coal min­ing. At their best Kopple and pho­tog­ra­ph­er Hart Perry bear unas­sum­ing, expres­sive wit­ness to the expe­ri­ences, aspi­ra­tions and abid­ing griev­ances of the Brookside min­ers and wives, who orga­nized aux­il­iary strike actions.”

Harlan County USA was shown in Harlan County after its com­ple­tion, but the site had to be pro­tect­ed by armed guards. As a protest state­ment, the Ku Klux Klan hung a goat near­by with the let­ters KKK carved across its belly.

The film won an Academy Award in 1977 for Best Documentary Feature. It was select­ed in 1990 for preser­va­tion in the National Film Registry by the Library of Congress.

Barbara Kopple went on to have a dis­tin­guished career as a pro­duc­er and direc­tor in film and tele­vi­sion. She won anoth­er Academy Award for Best Documentary for the 1990 film American Dream, which focused on a work­ers’ strike against the Hormel Foods Corporation. 

Other pop­u­lar doc­u­men­taries include Shut Up & Sing (2006), about the fall­out the Dixie Chicks faced after com­ments about President Bush and the war in Iraq, and Miss Sharon Jones (2015), about Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings and her strug­gle with can­cer. The sub­ject mat­ter of these films aligns with a quote from Barbara Kopple: “I’ve always been inter­est­ed in how peo­ple think, how they react to chal­lenges in their lives-what makes peo­ple tick. I’ve always been pas­sion­ate about social issues and caus­es, and I want­ed to make films that addressed impor­tant issues in very human terms.”

The Internet Movie Database rates Harlan County USA at 8.2 of 10. Rotten Tomatoes gives it a Critics Score of 100% and an Audience Score of 92%. In search­ing my Roku device, I was not able to find any free stream­ing sites, but there is a copy of the DVD on the shelf at the Clark County Public Library.

Harlan County USA is a pow­er­ful film that depicts the strug­gles of the work­ing class in Appalachia, the efforts of min­ers to orga­nize unions in their work­places, and the strength and deter­mi­na­tion of the women of Appalachia to stand up and fight for what they believe in. In an inter­view, Barbara Kopple described Harlan County USA as “the most impor­tant film in my life because I learned what life and death was about. I saw peo­ple real­ly stand­ing up for what they believed in. It had a great impres­sion on me through­out the rest of my career.”

Information for this Reel Classic review was gath­ered from sources includ­ing the Internet Movie Database (IMDb), Rotten Tomatoes, Turner Classic Movies (TCM), and Wikipedia.