MATEWAN and other movies we should be studying... Union movies for review and viewing during the latest class struggles in Chicago... Matewan, Salt of the Earth, Norma Ray and The Harlan County Wars...
Union organizing movies are as old as Hollywood and as new as April 1, 2016, in Chicago. As Chicago teachers and other school workers face their first "furlough" day as Mayor Rahm Emanuel's "Happy Easter" to the masses, some people might want to take the time to watch a few good union movies (instead of bemoaning the fact that the sixth season of "Game of Thrones" won't begin for a month). A close look at Hollywood demonstrates just how reactionary the owners of the studios have been, despite the fact that most of the actors and others who work in the entertainment industry are union brothers and sisters.
There are several very good union movies, however. None has been made, as far as I can tell, since the Reagan Reaction too deep hold on the minds of many over the last quarter century.
The movie Matewan should be in every union home library.Three great union movies are: Matewan; Salt of the Earth; Norma Ray; and The Harlan County Wars. All are about organizing, solidarity, and, in most cases, strikes.
Of those, my favorites is Matewan. Why? Because of the forthright way Matewan deals with so many key issues we will always face in union organizing and in working class struggles. Matewan got widespread distribution just before the latest blacklists and other manipulations took over the national propaganda machines. By 1987, when Matewan came out, unions were about to be depicted as the Bad Guys, close to the way the Cold Warriors were portraying the old Soviet Union.
Yet we need to remember: There was a time in the lifetime of some of us that union organizing movies were true to the facts and to the realities of the class struggle.
A five-minute clip from Matewan available on You Tube gives some sense of the movie. The You Tube clip includes one of my favorite comments about the reality SCAB: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qwEMIvDEFy4
Matewan (1987). Film: John Sayles's 'Matewan'
''Matewan,'' Rated PG-13 (''Special Parental Guidance Suggested for Children Younger Than 13''), contains several scenes of violence and some vulgar language. War in the Mines MATEWAN, written and directed by John Sayles; director of photography, Haskell Wexler; edited by Sonya Polonsky; music by Mason Daring; produced by Peggy Rajski; Joe... Chris Cooper; Danny... Will Oldham; Elma... Mary McDonnell; Few Clothes... James Earl Jones; Hillard... Jace Alexander; Sephus... Ken Jenkins; C. E. Lively... Bob Gunton; Ludie... Gary McCleery; Hickey... Kevin Tighe; Griggs... Gordon Clapp; Bridey Mae... Nancy Mette; Sid... David Strathairn; Cabell... Josh Mostel; Hardshell... John Sayles.
This is a very moving "Good guys (and gals) - Bad Guys (and gals) movie in the classic Hollywood sense. The bad guys even wear black hats. There is never any doubt where Sayles's sympathies lie. The characters are either good or evil. As a New York Times critic noted, "They're the idealized figures portrayed in the Government-sponsored murals that, during the Depression, were painted in post offices and other public buildings from one end of the country to the other." The good ones include a hard-working, staunch widow-lady (Mary McDonnell); her 15-year-old son (Will Oldham), a fiery lay-preacher who manages to find pro-union parables in the gospels; a great, bearlike African American man (James Earl Jones), who casts his lot with the strikers; a smarmy, union-sympathizing bar owner (Bob Gunton), who is finally exposed as company fink. They also include Matewan's police chief (David Strathairn, playing a Hatfield of Hatfields versus McCoys fame) and mayor (Josh Mostel). The public officials heroically stand up against the company; the town's lone hooker (Nancy Mette), turned to her trade after being widowed in a mine accident.
The real Bad Guys, company's two principal goons (Kevin Tighe and Gordon Clapp), arrive in town sent by the detective agency hired by the mine owners. They are almost drooling in their evilness. It's really great fun to watch. My favorite lines are from the leader of the African American miners who are brought in in a sealed box car to be scabs and who then turn around, under the leadership of the James Earl Jones character, and join and help lead the strike. I won't give away Jones's world famous line about the obscenity of the word SCAB (since it might not be politically correct for a brief time today), but it's worth a lot of the movie. Many scenes are just finely done, including the red baiting preacher's sermon and the final showdown between the striking miners and the gun thugs working for the mine company.
On Mach 23, Chicago Teachers Union President Karen Lewis mentioned that in the "old days" the ruling class would hire thugs to murder union strikers (and some union leaders). Hopefully the CTU will add union education to some of the other stuff it pushes.
The iconic shot from the movie Norma Ray.NORMA RAE is sometimes referenced as the classic union organizing movie, although the others mentioned here are at the same level.
The movie Norma Rae is important as a historical marker, marking the space between Hollywood's promotion of unions (in many cases) and the reactionary films that were to characterize the next quarter century (to this day). The 1987 movie Matewan was the end of that progressive era.
Even by the time Norma Rae was released in 1979, the Reagan Reaction was beginning to blow in full force. Norma Rae is a 1979 American film about a factory worker from a small town in North Carolina who becomes involved in the union organizing at the textile factory where she works. Norma Rae's move into unionism begins after the health of her and her co-workers are hurt by conditions in the factory. The film stars Sally Field in the title role, Beau Bridges as Norma Rae's husband, Sonny, and Ron Leibman as union organizer Reuben Warshowsky.
Sally Field won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of Norma Rae Webster. Norma Rae won a total of two awards, plus six other nominations. The film was selected for inclusion in the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress in 2011.
Norma Rae Webster is a minimum-wage worker in a cotton mill that has taken too much of a toll on the health of her family for her to ignore their poor working conditions. After hearing a speech by a New York union organizer, Reuben Warshowsky, Norma Rae decides to join the effort to unionize her shop. This causes conflict at home when Norma Rae's husband, Sonny, says she's not spending enough time in the home. She is pressured by management, but in the film's iconic scene she takes a piece of cardboard, writes the word "UNION" on it, stands on her work table, and slowly turns to show the sign around the room. It is a reflection of what used to happen in auto plants, when workers were able to stop the assembly line. The other workers stop their machines; the entire room becomes silent. After all the machines have been switched off, Norma Rae is taken to jail the union organizer.
She then decides to talk to her children and tell them the story of her life. After discussing it with Reuben, Sonny tells Norma there's no other woman in his mind and he will always remain with her. Norma Rae then successfully orchestrates an election to unionize the factory, resulting in a victory for the union. Finally, Reuben says goodbye to Norma; despite his being smitten with her throughout the movie, they only shake hands because he knows she is married and loves her husband, and Reuben heads back to New York.
Norma Rae, the movie, was based on Crystal Lee Sutton's life as a textile worker in Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina. There the battle for the workers union took place against a J.P. Stevens Textiles mill. Her actual protest, in the mill, is the scene in the film where she writes the sign "UNION" and stands on her worktable until all machines are silent. Sutton was fired from her job, but the mill was unionized, and Sutton later went to work as an organizer for the textile union. Globalization later ended most of the textile industry in the United States, thanks to NAFTA and other laws promoted by both Reagan Republicans and Clinton Democrats.
SALT OF THE EARTH is a world famous 1950s movie, done by blacklisted Hollywood leaders.
Salt of the Earth is a 1954 American drama film written by Michael Wilson, directed by Herbert J. Biberman, and produced by Paul Jarrico. All three had been blacklisted by the Hollywood establishment due to their alleged involvement in communist politics. They had been, at various times, members of the CPUSA (Communist Party USA).
Although Salt of the Earth is about a miners' strike in the Southwestern United States, it is also claimed to be one of the first pictures to advance "the feminist social and political point of view." Its plot centers on a long and difficult strike, based on the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico. In the film, the company is identified as "Delaware Zinc," and the setting is "Zinctown, New Mexico." Salt of the Earth shows how the miners, the company, and the police clash during the strike. Many of the actors were actual miners and their families, although the main character, Esperanza, was a famous actress, Rosaura Revueltas, who suffered for the rest of her career for her work on Salt of the Earth.
The film opens with the very moving (and now immortal) narration from Esperanza Quintero (Rosaura Revueltas):
"How shall I begin my story that has no beginning? My name is Esperanza, Esperanza Quintero. I am a miner's wife. This is our home. The house is not ours. But the flowers... the flowers are ours. This is my village. When I was a child, it was called San Marcos. The Anglos changed the name to Zinc Town. Zinc Town, New Mexico, U.S.A. Our roots go deep in this place, deeper than the pines, deeper than the mine shaft...."
The divisions within the working class will be familiar today. The issues in the strike include equity in wages for Mexican American workers with Anglo workers. There are also health and safety issues, as are depicted dramatically in most union organizing movies.
Feminism is a major issue from the beginning of Salt of the Earth. Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacon) helps organize the strike, but at home he treats his wife as a second-class citizen. Esperanza Quintero, pregnant with their third child, is passive at first and reluctant either to take part in the strike or to assert her rights for equality at home. She changes her attitude when the men are forced to end their picketing by a Taft-Hartley Act injunction. At the union hall, the women convince the men, after a long debate, that they should be allowed to participate and they join the picket line.
The film was called subversive and blacklisted because the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers sponsored it and many blacklisted Hollywood professionals helped produce it. The union had been expelled from the CIO in 1950 for its alleged communist-dominated leadership.
Director Herbert Biberman was one of the Hollywood screenwriters and directors who refused to answer the House Committee on Un-American Activities on questions of CPUSA affiliation in 1947. The "Hollywood Ten" were cited and convicted for "contempt of Congress and jailed". Biberman was imprisoned in the Federal Correctional Institution at Texarkana for six months. After his release he directed Salt of the Earth. Other participants who made the film and were blacklisted by the Hollywood studios include: Paul Jarrico, Will Geer, Rosaura Revueltas, and Michael Wilson.
The producers cast only five professional actors. The rest were locals from Grant County, New Mexico, or members of the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Local 890. Many of them had been part of the strike that inspired film's plot. Juan Chacón, for example, was a real-life Union Local president. In the film he plays the protagonist, who has trouble dealing with women as equals. The director was reluctant to cast him at first, thinking he was too "gentle," but both Revueltas and his sister-in-law, Sonja Dahl Biberman, wife of Biberman's brother Edward, urged him to cast Chacón as Ramon.
The film was denounced in the United States House of Representatives for its communist sympathies, and the FBI investigated the film's financing.
The American Legion called for a nationwide boycott of the film.
Film-processing labs were told not to work on Salt of the Earth and unionized projectionists were instructed not to show it. After its opening night in New York City, the film languished in the USA for 10 years because all but 12 theaters in the country refused to screen it.
By one journalist's account: "During the course of production in New Mexico in 1953, the trade press denounced it as a subversive plot, anti-Communist vigilantes fired rifle shots at the set, the film's leading lady Rosaura Revueltas was deported to Mexico, and from time to time a small airplane buzzed noisily overhead ... The film, edited in secret, was stored for safekeeping in an anonymous wooden shack in Los Angeles."
The Hollywood establishment did not embrace the film at the time of its release, when McCarthyism was in full force. The Hollywood Reporter charged at the time that it was made "under direct orders of the Kremlin." Pauline Kael, who reviewed the film for Sight and Sound in 1954, panned it as a simplistic left-wing "morality play" and said it was "as clear a piece of Communist propaganda as we have had in many years."
On the other hand, New York Times film critic Bosley Crowther reviewed the picture favorably, both the screenplay and the direction. Crowther wrote: "In the light of this agitated history, it is somewhat surprising to find that Salt of the Earth is, in substance, simply a strong pro-labor film with a particularly sympathetic interest in the Mexican -Americans with whom it deals...But the real dramatic crux of the picture is the stern and bitter conflict within the membership of the union. It is the issue of whether the women shall have equality of expression and of strike participation with the men. And it is along this line of contention that Michael Wilson's tautly muscled script develops considerable personal drama, raw emotion and power."
The film found a wide audience in both Western and Eastern Europe in the 1950s despite the fact that it was blacklisted in the United States during the McCarthy era. Salt of the Earth has long been available in both DVD and earlier VCR format. I gave a copy of the movie to the people at "La Casita" for the school library five years ago, and it was shown during those struggles.
HARLAN COUNTY WARS has one of the greatest scenes from the "Women's Movement" of any movie of the 1970s and 1980s. (That scene beats many other good movies of the era, including "Nine to Five" and others).
