Martin Ritt | Norma Rae / 1979

it comes with the job

by Douglas Messerli

 

Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch (screenplay), Martin Ritt (director) Norma Rae / 1979

 

      Martin Ritt's 1979 film Norma Rae is clearly, the most realistically conceived as well as the most focused of films on the actual issue of unions. Located in a small Southern US town, a region (as I mention in my discussion of There Goes My Everything in My Year 2006) where union leaders and even members were often thought to be Communists, and joining unions, accordingly, was perceived as an un-American act, the film presents the often brave and always strong-willed activities of Norma Rae Webster (Sally Fields, who won an Oscar for her role) and a Union organizer from New York, Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Liebman). Based on a real-life figure, Crystal Lee Sutton, who, while earning $2.65 an hour folding towels at the Roanoke Rapids, North Carolina, J. P Stevens plant, tried to organize her co-workers, the film proceeds in a fairly true-to-life, unspectacular manner to depict the gradual awakening of the workers to their needs and, most importantly, their rights.   

   Norma Rae's own difficulties with men, including her clueless husband, her latent attraction to Rueben, and their discomforts with opposing cultures and religions is all gently laid to rest early in the film so that Ritt can focus on the growing union activities and the inevitable repercussions upon her life. The mill itself, more than its unsympathetic owners and managers, is represented as a monstrous Dickensian machine, the air filled with wool dust and the pounding sound of the looms that voids almost any possibility of verbal communication and assures the eventual loss of hearing for its employees. The moment in the film where Norma Rae discovers that her mother has become hard of hearing is one of the most memorable in a series of scenes played out in the infernal factory, where employees are carefully watched for even the smallest of infractions.

     Refused permission to put up a union sign or even post company policies, arrested, and fired, Norma Rae gradually grows through Rueben's mentoring from a fairly ignorant country girl into a wiser woman who is transformed from just another worker to someone, as Crystal Lee Sutton is purported to have asked to be remembered, "who deeply care(s) for the working poor...." Upon being arrested and humiliated, Norma Rae breaking into tears, is given little sympathy by Rueben, who reports "It comes with the job."

 

   Her growing sense of determination and righteousness is at the center of Ritt's film, and its trajectory is what makes his film a fulfilling work. By the time that Norma Rae, like Sutton before her, closes down her machine and, standing on her work table while holding a cardboard sign upon which she has scrawled UNION, brings the entire factory to a silent halt, we know that no matter what the outcome, the workers have won and their relationship to the monstrous mechanic in which they toil, has been changed forever.

     In reality it took a year before the Amalgamated Clothing and Textile Workers Union won the right to represent the seven plants located in Roanoke Rapids. The court ordered that Sutton be paid back wages and returned to work. She returned for two days, quitting to work as a union organizer. On September 11 of this year (2009), Sutton died of brain cancer at the age of 68.

 

Los Angeles, October 14-17, 2009

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (October 2009), originally published with discussions of two other films, The Pajama Game and 

     On the Waterfront.

Reprinted from Reading Films: My International Cinema (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2012).