Word: iww
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...Hill director Bo Widerberg commits the worst of all artistic crimes: dishonesty towards his subject. In what purports to be a dramatization of Joe Hill's history, he has invented, deleted, and rearranged the life and times of the IWW bard. Such exploitation might be forgivable in the name of dramatic license, but Widerberg turns his liberties in no particular direction. The editing (which Widerberg also did) muddies the development of theme and plot with arbitrary shifts in scene. The script (again his work) offers no possibility for growth or awareness in the characters. The film's tone is soft...
Violence clung to the IWW; its members wore the scars inflicted by the self-righteous brutality of vigilantes. Repression and cruelty were an unavoidable part of the IWW's burden, a load that Joe Hill helped to bear. Widerberg avoids this facet of his story until the film's historical pretense forces the issue. Obliged to include such a mob action scene in the San Diego sequence, he skims over the ugliness and jolts the camera so that most of the clubbing doesn't show. Either from disinterest or squeamishness he is unwilling to deal with Joe's life...
...entire industry during its initial experimental development towards a polished craftsmanship we still associate with Hollywood. Joseph Henabery, Griffith's first assistant in Intolerance, offers a valuable portrait of Griffith's working methods, as well as stories about the problems of manipulating hundreds of extras while the newly-formed IWW tried to create unions; his delight at foiling their wicked socialist endeavors may be repellent to today's reader, yet serves as invaluable documentation of the transitional period when people just went out and made pictures, before restrictions boosted costs and took all the fun out of everything. At least...
Miss Flynn defended the actions of labor unions from their earliest days, including her participation in the International Workers of the World (IWW) as well as the actions of Teamster President Jimmy Hoffa today. "We don't organize unions to be pure and holy, but to help the workers," she insisted...
McCabe did not fear a repetition of the national political ferocity shown toward the IWW in the 1920's, but he felt that Eisenhower's attitude tends toward such an "atmosphere of terrors and intolerance...