Word: norma
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...have entertained about artistic integrity. But the opposite situation--watching a former TV sit-com starlet metamorphose into a first-rate actress--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...
Field's performance however derives much of its power from the screenplay written by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank, Jr.--it's hokey as hell but it plays. Motivated by a magazine article by Henry F. Leifermann, the screenplay delineates the growing bond between Norma Rae, a hard-assed little cracker and Reuben (Ron Leibman) a New York Jewish labor organizer who comes down to unionize her factory. Refreshingly, their bond stems not from wild, trans-ethnic couplings but from a shared philosophy towards life. Ravetch and Frank use humor, wit and most of all, respect in their screenplay...
...once, a director has been able to deal honestly with the life of a working-class woman, using neither pathos nor piquancy. Widowed by a beer brawl and left with two children, one illegitimate, Norma Rae is trapped in a one-industry, sexist little shitbox of a southern town. Her plight evokes far more sympathy than that of many recent feminist heroines like Erica from An Unmarried Woman or the French nymphets in One Sings, the Other Doesn't. While directors no longer trumpet forth about making black films, many still want to make women movies. Ritt escapes this well...
...idealistic halo surrounding unions has deteriorated into a fearful contempt for leaders like Jimmy Hoffa and the New Orleans police chief "who'll wreck the 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...
...hurts to say this. We need more movies about the realities of workaday life in America and more about ordinary women dealing with ordinary problems of making a life and a living. One very much wants to like Norma Rae better than one in good critical conscience...