Word: ritt
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...illusions I might 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...
...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-intentioned pot-hole by creating a central figure who's got not only XX chromosomes but grit and brains as well...
...when the 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...
...emphasize just how platonic the bond between Norma and Reuben is, Ritt marries her off to Sonny Webster (Beau Bridges), the archtype 'good ole boy.' Handsome but lethargic, this youthful Billy Carter barely peeps while his new bride flies about doing labor organizing with the self-described 'lefto' from Central Park West. Bridges tries valiantly to inject this regional stereotype with credibility but unfortunately, his Sonny comes off like a muscle-bound teddy-bear blessed with the patience of Baptist Mother Theresa. Supposedly a divorced father, Sonny behaves with such liberated understanding that it seems impossible any woman would depart...
...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 Rae's father from overwork. There is an awful familiarity here and in Martin Ritt's conventional staging. The angles and editing are those of 30 years ago, and they seem less a reversion to classicism than a confession of creative failure...