"Black Fury" was the only time Paul Muni worked with Michael Curtiz. Potentially, this film could have been great but it is far from that. Muni wasn't very keen on acting in films, his preference was always going to be the theatre. He wasn't able to tone down his acting style for the cinema for the most part and he often appeared to be playing a caricature. He is guilty of this in the film "Black Fury." He is too theatrical in his facial expressions, his body language etc. Paul Muni plays a simple but honest coal miner who unwittingly becomes involved in a bitter dispute between the workers and the management. Muni, along with other miners, is subjected to intimidation. Barton MacLane is cast as a villain (he usually was) who is sent to destroy the livelihood of all the coal miners in this small community. Technically, the film is a disappointment. It is all too obvious that the sets representing the town in question are all on a soundstage. The sets don't look real and the direction from Michael Curtiz tends to suffer. The story itself is actually quite good and the film maintains a steady pace. The climax is also effective.

"Black Fury" was the second film Paul Muni made after signing a lucrative and very unusual contract with Warner Brothers that essentially allowed him script approval and a great amount of creative control. Muni had been fascinated by the true story of a miner's strike in Philadelphia, and did extensive research, including meeting with a judge who had presided over the case.I've seen all of Muni's films repeatedly and this is unquestionably one of his most accomplished and most unusual roles. For an actor who wast trained on the Yiddish stage and often played old men (even as a juvenile), it's remarkable that during the height of his film career, Muni never played a Jewish character. Joe Radek, a Hungarian immigrant, is probably the closest Muni ever came to playing a character that he "could have been" in real life -- he, too, was an Eastern European immigrant, of working-class stock, and had his parents been laborers instead of itinerant performers, he could easily have wound up like Radek. Radek is a child-like, life-of-the-party type who speaks in broken English, often in the third person ("Everybody love Joe Radek!") For students of acting history, it's the type of performance that you might expect from a "method" actor of a generation later; indeed, those who cite Brando's Stanley Kowalski as "breaking the rules" by speaking with a mouth full of food in a realistic fashion would do well to note Muni's performance here, as his speech is sometimes imprecise and in an early scene he breaks up a fight and makes a speech while gnawing his lunch.The script is fairly decent -- although politically problematic, as it seems to go a bit far to get Joe elected as president of the new union, and presents unions as ineffective or corrupt (and management as greedy and uncaring, of course). At the time of its release, the film was well-reviewed, but the "controversy" over unionization meant that it was censored or banned in some areas, so it was not a box-office success. Still, Muni's performance was powerful enough that he received a "write-in" nomination for Best Actor -- a practice that has since been discontinued by the Oscars (Muni and Bette Davis, for "Of Human Bondage," were the only actors to receive write-in nominations).It's also worth seeing for the excellent, uncompromising direction of Michael Curtiz; supporting performances (and they are ALL supporting in a Muni film -- he is unquestionably the star) are all well-played. Karen Morley is understated as Joe's would-be girl; John Qualen, who has one of the saddest faces in movie history, is excellent as Joe's best friend. The film's ending is a bit hackneyed from today's perspective, but quite effective."Black Fury" is one of about four dozen films from before 1936 that "should" be available on DVD, but isn't, and it's a shame. It is occasionally aired on cable and well worth a look if you are a fan of Muni or socially conscious films of the depression era (in the vein of "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang," "The Grapes of Wrath," etc.)

BLACK FURY could have been a straightforward story of miners being exploited by greedy bosses and directed by Michael Curtiz, that's what it ought to be. But at its centerpiece is the character of PAUL MUNI as a cheerful "honkie" coal miner with an accent thick enough to cut with a knife and chewing all the scenery in sight. Performances around him are uniformly good under Curtiz' strong direction, but he lets Muni get away with the some of the wildest bits of overacting he's ever done.If you can sit through this one without cringing at Muni's overbaked job of acting, you may be able to watch the film more objectively than I did. Did I mention that the story is strictly on the depressing side? For starters, Muni's sweetheart (KAREN MORLEY) runs off to Pittsburgh with another man, police officer WILLIAM GARGAN, turning Muni's world upside down when he planned on marriage.Disgruntled miners are upset by union bosses and the plot thickens as one of the miners (J. CARROLL NAISH) sets up Muni and his friends for trouble as he collaborates with the union leaders. Muni doesn't know he's being used as a scapegoat for the union. He only realizes it after Croner (Naish) leaves town with Muni held responsible for the resulting mess and riots. Every plot turn from then on plunges the story into darker territory with Muni caught up in a skirmish with police that causes the death of his best friend.For the finale, Muni gets out of a hospital bed to bring about an explosive climax at the mine with girlfriend Morley returning to redeem herself in his eyes.Summing up: Melodramatic mess despite strong direction by Curtiz, hampered by Muni's overwrought performance which some commentators have mistaken for good acting.

Paul Muni, David Thomson once wrote, was the '30s' idea of a great actor: He never looked the same twice. Here he's a hail-fellow-well-met Eastern European immigrant coal miner in a dreary Pennsylvania burg, deceived by union busters and weighed down by a ten-ton accent. Indeed the screenplay seldom rises above a fifth-grade literacy level, the better to illustrate the goodheartedness of these poor but honest laborers. But five minutes of Muni, and you've seen the whole performance -- a Zorba-the-miner "life force" who yells all his lines and sounds unfortunately like Steve Martin's wild-and-crazy-guy character from Saturday Night Live in the '70s.Warners does come up with a convincingly grimy set and a capable stock-company supporting cast, but the dramaturgy is connect-the-dots. One miner shouts and sways the whole crowd, then another, then another -- what a gullible bunch this must be. The evil cops and management figures are so absurdly evil that nuance is lost. The third act does whip up to an exciting blow-up-the-mine climax, but then it's resolved in headline montages, as if Warners suddenly ran out of money, or film. And Michael Curtiz -- I didn't think this fine director was capable of this -- stages the crowd scenes clumsily, shifting point of view confusingly and slapping the mise-en-scene together hard, with loud music. Certainly the studio is on the side of the angels, arguing for a fair day's pay for a fair day's work, and as a '30s sociological curio the movie is not without interest. But Muni's monotonous bluster and an elementary script combine to create a cinematic cave-in.