FILM REVIEW

A SURPRISE FROM HOLLYWOOD

Not too long before the film Norma Rae opened in Cleveland, a good woman friend wrote to me from New York: "See Norma Rae. It's honestly uplifting! People can find things to criticize...don't-you'll ove her. It's an order: see it!"'

If any of you What She Wants readers haven't nanaged to get to this fine movie yet, I'll say the same to you. This is a good, strong, pro-union film about southern textile mill organizing, but it's also a very moving feminist film. In it a young woman gets her life together, becomes stronger, smarter, more confident through the battle to unionize her workplace, the O.P. Henley textile mill. Just last month, in a review of the documentary, With Babies and Banners: The Story of the Women's Emergency Brigade, I said that commercially made and listributed films hardly ever show women growing hrough a collective struggle to change rather than adapt to the conditions of their lives. In most ways, Norma Rae is a surprising exception to this rule.

Martin Ritt (Hudd, The Molly Maguires, Sounder, The Front) directs, and Sally Field (Gidget, The Flyng Nun!) stars-finally she gets a chance to show what she can do, and she does it superbly. Norma Rae Webster is tough, smart, decent, and, to begin with, completely messed up. She lives in a small southern town totally dominated by the O.P. Henley Company. She has been widowed, has two kids, one of whom is illegitimate, is exploited by men who buy her steak dinners, leave her with children, and beat 1er up when she says "enough". She is also exploited by the mill, where she is paid $1.33 an hour in a plant where the noise level causes deafness and the cotton lust creates byssinosis, the dreaded brown lung.

Norma Rae's life begins to change when Ruben Warshovsky (Ron Liebman) comes to town to organize the Henley mill for the Textile Workers' Jnion of America. Warshovsky, a New York Jew, is in experienced organizer but is a "fish out of water", as Norma Rae tells him, in a tight little outhern town. To succeed he must find someone rom the town itself who can spearhead the drive to

get the union into the plant. Norma Rae is it.

解

Norma Rae (Sally Field) struggles for the union (MS)

Norma Rae's relationship with Ruben is an equal riendship in action, with almost none of the sexual ontent that our society demands in female/male onnections. They joke, fight, think together, plan, ut never touch. Her relationship. with Buddy Vebster (Beau Bridges), whom she marries, is more ender but less absorbing. When Buddy asks her if he's ever slept with Ruben, Norma Rac answers, 'No, but he's in my head.” A woman loves two men 1 different ways—another first in a mass distribuion film!

There are so many scenes I could describe, each ne building the picture of Norma as she relates to

Page 6/What She Wants/May, 1979

her father and mother, her children, ministers, managers, and co-workers. Three stand out the most: the hilarious, screaming fight that develops when Buddy complains that Norma is neglecting her housework, linked later on to another touching one in which he accepts her as a "free woman" and says he wants to stick by her "until you're tired, old, anything that comes up". The scene in which Norma prepares her children for the gossip she knows will come out of her short stay in jail for disturbing the peace. And most of all, the scene when, about to be arrested for copying down the text of a racist company announcement from the bulletin board, she climbs onto a table, trembling, and holds up a sign saying "Union". We see the millworkers' faces turned up to hers, feel the tension, until, one by one, women first, her co-workers pull the switches of their looms and the bone-shattering noise of the mill dies to silence.

Throughout the film, "women's issues" and "workers' issues" are intertwined and explored so that we see the close, vital relationship between the two: Norma Rae can't be a free woman until she can get some control over the company that rules Henleyville; the millworkers won't win if the potential of women like Norma Rae is submerged. Norma Rae is also sensitive to the issue of racism: Norma leaves her church because the minister refused to lend the building for an integrated union meeting; she holds the meeting in her house, where she informs Buddy, "Only men ever gave me any trouble was white men!" She is arrested for copying the text of a management leaflet designed to set white millworker against black.

As my friend said, people can find criticisms, and I do have a couple. I wanted to get more of a sense of the millworkers as a group and as individuals. There are strong faces that tell stories that the film leaves untouched: the little old woman in a hairnet; the haggard woman whose husband died of brown lung; a Black woman and two Black men who are obviously central to the struggle but whose characters are not developed. (One reviewer remarked on how "real" the millworkers look-they are real; the filming was done in a unionized mill in Opelika, Alabama, and the extras are all millworkers.)

True, Norma Rae is the story of one woman, and I wouldn't want to see less of her. But the film comes close to implying that it's one brave (wo)man who changes history, not the millworkers as a group. Individuals do reappear, but the "extras" remain extras. We get little sense of a group of key people who will continue the fight once the bargaining election is

won.

That election victory seems to come pretty easy, too. Though Norma Rae and Ruben are harassed and opposed by management, their fight is not so hard as the long, gruelling battles that textile workers have waged and are waging with companies like J.P. Stevens today. Something that few reviews have mentioned, but that viewers should know, is that Norma Rae is based, very closely in some scenes, on the experience of a real woman, Crystal Lee Jordan, who was active in the struggle to get a union into the seven J.P. Stevens plants in Roanoke Rapids, South Carolina. The scenes in which Norma Rae stands on the table with the Union sign and explains to her kids why she's an activist are taken almost directly from Crystal Lee Jordan's account of her own experiences; the leaflet described in the film which tells white workers that Blacks will take over the union comes almost word-for-word from a J.P. Stevens management announcement.

J.P. Stevens (O.P. Henley) is very bad news. It's the second largest of the giant American textile companies (83 mills) and totally non-union. It is famous for destroying New England communities by sending runaway shops South to escape paying union wages.

It's also famous for paying $54.67 per week less than the national production workers' average, for racial and sexual discrimination, for dangerous working conditions (noise, heat, unguarded machinery, cotton dust), for firing those who try to unionize, and for a host of violations of the National Labor Relations Act.

WORKERS

WUA

UNION

FL-CIO CLC ERIC

The real "Norma Rae": Crystal Lee Jordan (MS) Crystal Lee Jordan and other workers were able to win a representation election (as in the movie) in the Roanoke Rapids mills in 1974. J.P. Stevens has still refused to sign even one contract-fighting the union through firings, through the courts, through bribing officials, and so forth. The Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union has turned to a long and exhausting route through the courts and to a nationwide boycott of Stevens' products to force the company to settle. Norma Rae's struggle is not over. As Lucy Taylor, a former Stevens worker disabled by brown lung has written, "It's too late for me, Dust was our destiny. We will keep fighting that the future will be better than the past!”

-Carolyn Platt

Ed. Note: We read in the May issue of MS that real-life organizers Crystal Lee Jordan and Eli Zivkovich declined to sign releases for the film unless director Martin Ritt guaranteed them sĉript control. His refusal necessitated that he fictionalize parts of the story and introduce "Norma Rae" with a legal disclaimer, stating that "The events, people, and firms depicted in this film are fictional." Subsequently Jordan has decided to work with Barbara Kopple, director of the Academy Award winning film "Harlan County, U.S.A." Kopple has given script control to those principally involved and has started fund-raising efforts for the film. We wish to provide this information because we believe that the circumstances surrounding the making of a film, as well as the film itself, have political significance. What She Wants still encourages you to see "Norma Rae" and, when the second version is released, to compare for yourself.

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