BEFORE: Here we go, Sally Field carries over again from "Not Without My Daughter", to the other film she won an Oscar for (the first for me was "Places in the Heart", only that happened second) and I'm all out of Sally Field movies now, she's clear off my list, and currently tied with Samuel L. Jackson and Liam Neeson with nine appearances this year, but who knows who could surpass them during the Doc Block, possibly Dick Cavett? Merv Griffin? Hell, if I watch all the "Saw" movies in October then they'll all get passed by Tobin Bell.
This film's been on my list for years, so it feels like quite an accomplishment to cross it off, all it took was building a whole Sally Field marathon around it and re-classifying it from a great film for Labor Day to a great film for Mother's Day, since it features a working single mother. So let's give a big SHOUT-out today to the single moms AND the working moms.
THE PLOT: A young single mother and textile worker agrees to help unionize her mill despite the problems and dangers involved.
AFTER: Darn it, I wish this movie were more fun, it's just not very fun, and therefore I'm missing fun in my life. Why can't more movies be FUN? Note: I am going out tonight to see a certain Marvel movie, which looks like a lot of FUN, but I won't be able to post the review until the end of the month. But it's playing today at the theater where I work, so if I go today, my ticket will be FREE, and you can't beat FUN and FREE.
OK, fine, before I watch "Thunderbolts" let me get through (yawn) this film about labor unions and textile workers, and oh God, I'm falling asleep just thinking about it. Between the raising of awareness, the recruiting, the printing of flyers, more recruiting, the depictions of people being overworked and underpaid, again and again and again. Man, if the goal of this film was to demonstrate how boring it is to work at a textile mill for 12-hour shifts, then mission accomplished. Didn't these workers know how to have any fun? Not even on their coffee breaks? I guess once you finish two cigarettes and a cup of coffee, that break is over, and there's just no time for FUN, is there? I feel you, just replace "textile mill" with "animation studio" and you'll understand why I quit my job a month ago, I was stressed out and I wasn't having any fun - not that work HAS to be fun, but it can be.
I can't say that I've ever been in a union, for 35 years I've managed to work for companies that were too small to unionize, and I'm partially grateful for that, because I did get to take home all my pay and not fork over union dues. But I support unions in theory and what they stand for, I'm sure my grandfather and parents were in unions, my dad was a Teamster for many years, and my mother was probably in a union for teachers, but I've really been avoiding them. When I worked at a Manhattan movie theater in the summer of 2021, they were starting to unionize the ushers, but I was already planning my exit. Now at the other theater someone is trying to get the projectionists and techs to join the union, so it's an issue that may come up again for me in the near future. Maybe this time I won't just find another job somewhere else.
I think some professions need unions more than others - truck drivers, plumbers, machinists, hell, pilots and transportation workers, sure. Restaurant workers, sure, why not, but I think when you get to places like department stores, groceries, and such, I don't know if I see the point. TV and film professionals, I know they have guilds for directors, producers, and writers, and I'm sure all the electricians and set workers on big film and TV projects are in unions, but as I've been in independent film for 30 years, it just never came up - my boss would have been against anything that cost film money to join or gave more rights to his employees. So that means I stayed employed for 30 years just on my own skills and merits, I had no union backing me up - so I must have been really good at my job, or I was just plain un-replaceable.
Anyway, I dug the union organizer from NYC, Reuben Warshowsky, who played the "fish out of of water" character to the hilt. He bites into a hot dog at a ball game and spits it out, complaining that "It's not Nathan's!" He knows all the tricks that employers use to keep their employees down, like hiding the unionization notices on the bulletin boards, or when that fails, hiding the bulletin boards themselves. They also tried to play the race card, telling the white workers that the black workers were trying to take their shifts, thus turning the employees against each other. Norma Rae joins his cause when her father feels ill while working at the plant, and management told him that despite his arm pain (a tell-tale sign of a heart attack) that he had to keep working until it was time for his break.
The plant managers rearrange the shifts, so that the workers end up doing more work for less pay, and when management tries to fire Norma for spending too much company time talking about unions, and trying to copy down the wording of a racist flier, that's when she holds up a giant sign that says "UNION" and initiates a work shut-down. She gets arrested, but still manages to bring about the change needed to force a vote over unionizing.
They kind of suggested some kind of love triangle between Norma Rae, Reuben, and her husband, Sonny, but nothing really happened between Norma and Reuben, they just went swimming together that one time. Which is fine, we didn't really need a full-on love triangle here, and anyway Reuben had an on-again, off-again girlfriend back in New York, starting something on the road would only have cheapened things, and anyway it wasn't that kind of movie.
This movie is based on the real story of Crystal Lee Sutton, who became a union organizer at a textile mill in North Carolina, and wrote a book about that in 1975. She was similarly fired from her job for standing on a table and encouraging her co-workers to turn their machines off. What's important to note is that after a wave of successful unionization in the textile industry, a lot of mills and factories closed down anyway because manufacturing moved from the U.S. to other countries, like China and Mexico, where presumably there are no unions to deal with. So union organizers maybe won the battle, but lost the war. Years later, now that there are tariffs placed on all imports, it kind of remains to be seen whether this means that factories will open up in the U.S. again, theoretically it would be cheaper to make everything here and not import it, and now doubly so. But maybe we forgot how to make things in the U.S.? Anyway who knows if the tariffs will be in place long enough to bring this change about, it seems like that would take some time. So I kinda doubt it.
Directed by Martin Ritt (director of "Murphy's Romance")
Also starring Beau Bridges (last seen in "Hit and Run"), Ron Leibman (last seen in "Sr."), Pat Hingle (last seen in "The Grifters"), Barbara Baxley (last seen in "A Shock to the System"), Gail Strickland (last seen in "When a Man Loves a Woman"), Morgan Paull (last seen in "Ensign Pulver"), Robert Broyles, John Calvin (last seen in "The Cheap Detective"), Booth Colman (last seen in "Them!"), Lee de Broux (last seen in "Frances"), James Luisi, Vernon Weddle (last seen in "The Parallax View"), Gilbert Green, Bob Minor (last seen in "The Replacement Killers"), Mary Munday (last seen in "Magic"), Jack Stryker (last seen in "Hard to Hold"), Gregory Walcott (last seen in "Thunderbolt and Lightfoot"), Noble Willingham (last seen in "Fire in the Sky"), Lonny Chapman (last seen in "The Hunted"), Bert Freed (last seen in "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"), Bob Hannah (last seen in "Fled"), Edith Ivey (last seen in "One Missed Call"), Scott Lawton, Frank McRae (last seen in "The End"), Gerry Okuneff, Gina Kaye Pounders, Henry Slate (last seen in "Murphy's Romance"), Melissa Ann Wait, Joe Dorsey (last seen in "Club Paradise"), Sherry Velvet Foster, Grace Zabriskie (last seen in "No Good Deed" (2002)), Stuart Culpepper, Carolyn Danforth, Charlie Briggs, Billie Joyce Buck, Fred Covington, J. Don Ferguson (last seen in "The Program"), Clayton Landey (last seen in "Bandit"), Bill Pannell, Thomas D. Samford III, Roy Tatum.
RATING: 5 out of 10 spot-checks
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