A dramatisation set north of the border but actually shot in Southall of events at Knocklinnoch Castle Colliery which created a national sensation in September 1950 when 129 miners were trapped underground by a landslide. Although an early feather in the cap of both Group 3 and director Philip Leacock - originally opening amidst much fanfare at the Edinburgh Festival - few people actually went to see it; and this is only the fourth review ever to be posted of it on the IMDb in over twenty years.
The British public always had an ambivalent attitude to coal miners. (We all know what Margaret Thatcher called them!) No one in their right mind would want to go down the pit for a living; but they were a by-word for union militancy both before and after the General Strike. The censors kept a careful eye on films about them, with the result that just as prison films deal with riots and break-outs rather than the day-to-day tedium of prison life, so films about miners concentrate on colliery disasters. So this film is basically 'Morning Departure' underground rather than underwater.
