The Proud Valley (1940, Pen Tennyson) (Patreon)

52/100

Finally, a Paul Robeson film (from this particular Criterion box set, which does not include e.g. Show Boat or Song of Freedom) with an explicitly musical bent...and it transforms midway from a geographically flavorful Brassed Off-style story about colliery musicians (a cappella vocalists, here, rather than brass bands) into a claustrophobic trapped-down-the-mine melodrama. Not a bad one, either, albeit rooted in noble self-sacrifice that speaks directly to wartime sentiment; there's a horrifying inexorability to the sequence in which a runaway car hurtles toward two miners who are attempting to shore up the hole they made to get through rubble. Still, I was more engaged overall by the early, relatively carefree portrait of this Welsh mining town, with its romances and rivalries and almost unbearably adorable children. Robeson's the headliner, and initially the plot revolves around him serving as a ringer in one mine's male choir, which could easily have been the entire movie. Rather than build to a final competition, however, the script keeps throwing in mining disasters, providing "David Goliath" (I swear that's really the name of Robeson's character) multiple opportunities to demonstrate heroism and win over the village's small number of racist holdouts. Fidelity to realism gets taken too far during a long, tedious middle stretch that sees the mine closed and its unemployed workers first trying to scrounge up a meager living by other means and then collectively walking to London—a four-day journey by foot, featuring many longueurs and dissolves—in order to make their case for the mine to be reopened despite obvious dangers (which are then realized in the exciting finale). That David volunteers to remain in the lobby, over protest, while his white co-workers meet with the mine owners—"I wouldn't be much help to you in there"—is a striking moment, both pragmatic and pointed, but the film feels very ordinary for too long. 

It also features what might be the single worst composite shot I've ever seen.