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...Sizemore is a coal miner who has practically no money and lives in a rented house in Appalachia, where the hallow he lives in is choked in a layer of "red dog" coal slag left by the strippers for "surface miners," as the industry calls them). He's been broke more than once, drives a '68 Ford after going three years without one and wheezes like a train when he walks around because he has second-stage black lung. He lives in a place where school teachers quote from the National Enquirer and where the deputy sheriff pistol-whipped...
...YEARS--except for one time, a crucial time because it couches the explanation George Vecsey gives for why this coal miner literally has a jar of moonshine in one hand and a copy of Das Kapital in the other. Vecsey had to get at this somehow, because Sizemore is no quintessential miner-mountaineer. Yet he is not freak show, either. How could this socialist grow out of these barren hills? It has something to do with being suddenly laid off for nine months during the fifties, having some time to think, and making a decision. The tragedy of Appalachia--which...
Vecsey makes certain that he's not showing us an oddity in this "Story of a Coal Miner," and he tells how Sizemore deals with his fellow workers in a locker-room sort of way (Vecsey, who used to be a sportswriter until he went to cover Appalachia for The New York Times, gets into the camaraderie of the miners' bathhouse). But the powerful images are still the pistol whipping, and the time one of Dan Sizemore's neighbors shot the dog belonging to his retarded son (Blackie, as Vecsey tells us several times), and the silent looks when they...
...understand the failures of the past. The film gives the sense of the revelation of a scar. This impression is reinforced by Director Lindsay Anderson's remark that for Storey, "the circumstances of the piece are extremely personal." Storey's father is a coal miner in the north of England. Like Steven, Storey has written novels and like Andrew, has also tried his hand at painting...
...coal operators did finally "yield" to miners the basic human right to leave mines whenever they sense imminent danger. They can do so now without fear of pay-docking. But talk of miner-safety inspection committees and "control over the conditions of the working place" got lost in the shuffle...