This is a rather nice movie, more gentle than disturbing, despite the social conflict involved. Ron Liebman, a union representative, comes down to a textile mill in the South and tries to organize the workers. He runs into indifference from the good folk of Shinbone or Monkey Junction or whatever it is, and hostility from the management of the plant. His first convert is Norma Rae, Sally Field, and she gradually develops an all-consuming enthusiasm, a moral calling, to get the union established. It costs her a good deal. Management attempts to buy her off by promoting her to a position in which she must check her father's work. Humiliating for him. He dies. She neglects her family -- her four kids of varying legitimacy and the guy she's living with, Beau Bridges. She was never exactly a flower of Southern womanhood but now she's become a mover and shaker and it naturally upsets people. But under Liebman's patient and humane guidance she recruits just about everyone and the union wins.
Written and directed by the team that brought us "Hud" and "Hombre", it's remarkable as much for what doesn't happen as for what does.
First, though, this cleared the path through the woods for any number of later films featuring declasse floozies who fight injustice -- "Erin Brokovich" being an example. This is an original and gets bonus points for it.
As for what it leaves out, there is a set up for an affair between the charming Liebman and the frustrated Field -- but it doesn't happen, not even when the two are swimming alone, bare-assed, in a muddy river and talking about their private lives. What a temptation THAT must have been for the writers and if they had less in the way of resolution, it would have happened.
The writers also managed to neatly sidestep the temptation to turn the mill's management into a horde of rotten, filthy, violent lawbreakers. They're hostile, yes, and careless about the welfare of their employees. (The women can't leave their posts, even when they're having their periods.) However, they are not evil thugs skulking in the shadows and they don't put the nocuous Liebman in the hospital. Management violates the law only in small ways. Liebman -- who is very law-savvy -- has a legal right to post his recruiting letters on the company bulletin board but management posts them so high up that only Wilt Chamberlain on stilts could read them. The only violence, and it's brief, is when some white workers clobber a black employee under the impression that African-Americans are banding together to lead the union so they can order the white folks around.
The script isn't flawless. Ron Liebman is the sophisticated Jewish New Yorker who brings enlightenment to this benighted Southern outpost of civilization. He's a paragon of normality with no weaknesses. He introduces Field to Dylan Thomas. He teaches her Yiddishisms. A stereotype. I wish we'd been able to see him in some devalued activity. Maybe he could have a collection of panties in his dresser drawer or something.
And the bravura scene in which Norma Rae is fired and about to be thrown out of the deafeningly noisy mill. She leaps to a table top and holds up a printed sign reading UNION. The employees stare at her without expression. Eons seem to pass while she slowly rotates so that everyone can read the sign. Then one woman turns off her machine. Slowly, one by one, the others follow suit until finally the mill is completely and shockingly silent. A great movie moment but it jars with its lack of logic. When the final vote is taken, almost half the employees vote AGAINST the union. So where were these right-to-work people when the machines were being shut down? I've singled out these two flaws because they are buried under the multitude of virtues in the rest of the script. The story is pretty moving, and I applaud it for sticking as closely as it does to reality. When they part after their joint success, Liebman and Field don't even kiss good-bye. It's hard to imagine.
Written and directed by the team that brought us "Hud" and "Hombre", it's remarkable as much for what doesn't happen as for what does.
First, though, this cleared the path through the woods for any number of later films featuring declasse floozies who fight injustice -- "Erin Brokovich" being an example. This is an original and gets bonus points for it.
As for what it leaves out, there is a set up for an affair between the charming Liebman and the frustrated Field -- but it doesn't happen, not even when the two are swimming alone, bare-assed, in a muddy river and talking about their private lives. What a temptation THAT must have been for the writers and if they had less in the way of resolution, it would have happened.
The writers also managed to neatly sidestep the temptation to turn the mill's management into a horde of rotten, filthy, violent lawbreakers. They're hostile, yes, and careless about the welfare of their employees. (The women can't leave their posts, even when they're having their periods.) However, they are not evil thugs skulking in the shadows and they don't put the nocuous Liebman in the hospital. Management violates the law only in small ways. Liebman -- who is very law-savvy -- has a legal right to post his recruiting letters on the company bulletin board but management posts them so high up that only Wilt Chamberlain on stilts could read them. The only violence, and it's brief, is when some white workers clobber a black employee under the impression that African-Americans are banding together to lead the union so they can order the white folks around.
The script isn't flawless. Ron Liebman is the sophisticated Jewish New Yorker who brings enlightenment to this benighted Southern outpost of civilization. He's a paragon of normality with no weaknesses. He introduces Field to Dylan Thomas. He teaches her Yiddishisms. A stereotype. I wish we'd been able to see him in some devalued activity. Maybe he could have a collection of panties in his dresser drawer or something.
And the bravura scene in which Norma Rae is fired and about to be thrown out of the deafeningly noisy mill. She leaps to a table top and holds up a printed sign reading UNION. The employees stare at her without expression. Eons seem to pass while she slowly rotates so that everyone can read the sign. Then one woman turns off her machine. Slowly, one by one, the others follow suit until finally the mill is completely and shockingly silent. A great movie moment but it jars with its lack of logic. When the final vote is taken, almost half the employees vote AGAINST the union. So where were these right-to-work people when the machines were being shut down? I've singled out these two flaws because they are buried under the multitude of virtues in the rest of the script. The story is pretty moving, and I applaud it for sticking as closely as it does to reality. When they part after their joint success, Liebman and Field don't even kiss good-bye. It's hard to imagine.