Word: milles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...amazed me. Expecting "Gidget Goes to Harlan County," I was surprised, impressed and moved by Sally (Flying Nun) Field's performance in Martin Ritt's new film, Norma Rae. She delivers a powerful shaded performance as Southern woman who slowly learns to value herself. Playing a sassy, kicked-around mill worker, Field brings an almost autobiographical intensity to the role. Her aging starlet cuteness suddenly works--like Field herself, Norma Rae is a woman cashing in on the remaining vestiges of a squirrel-mouthed, cheerleader prettiness. Martin Ritt must be congratulated--he alone saw ability in an actress whose talents...
...city if our demands aren't met," Ritt has made a movie about places disenchantment hasn't reached...because unions aren't allowed. Norma Rae sharply reminds us that yes, there places where people work for substandard wages and who are forbidden to unionize. The scenes in the textile mill lack the blatant horror of coal mining but instead, they capture the numbing, back-breaking monotony which is just as lethal to the spirit and body. Norma's struggle to organize her factory has an innocent vigor against which Ritt plays off the smugness surrounding the union officials who come...
Norma Rae is the story of trashy white woman (Sally Field), a textile worker in a small Southern town, who discovers that she actually has a social conscience when a labor organizer (Ron Leibman) arrives at her mill to establish a union. Despite his education and his uplifting concerns, he is a rainmaker figure, a man capable of breaking through the various dins (of factory, family and juke joints) that have drowned out the voice of Norma Rae's best instincts. His winning out over her suspicions (there is a romantic attraction here that is wisely left unconsummated...
...courtship and real marriage between Field and a gas station attendant (Beau Bridges), a man with few brains but good, patient instincts. The problem lies in story development. There is something dreadfully predictable about the way the tale moves. When Norma Rae finally causes all the machines in the mill to be stopped through the sheer force of her belief in justice, our response is to wonder why it took so long for the film makers to reach this big scene. It is the same with other sequences: company goons on the attack, the death of Norma...
Peking has agreed to buy nuclear reactors from France, a steel mill from Japan and oil drilling equipment from the U.S., and hundreds of other sales are under discussion. The cumulative import bill could easily exceed $40 billion...