Review of Norma Rae (1979) by Danielle S — 04 Mar 2008

Sally Field gives a bright and forceful performance as Norma Rae, a cotton mill worker and single mother living with her parents, who also work at the mill. In fact, the mill is the town's main employer and, as such, sees fit to run roughshod over the rights of its employees.

The film does a good job of capturing the feel of the unpleasant environment in which these people work: machines clatter incessantly and are densely packed into the prison-like factory, creating a hot and noisy hell from which there are few opportunities to escape.

And yet the film never really delves too deeply into the conflict between the workers and the management - which should have formed the core of the story - other than in a strictly conventional "good guys vs.

bad guys" manner. All the management are depicted as mean-spirited and unsmiling, with no redeeming features, who stoop to phone tapping and incitement of racial hatred to try and foil the plans of Union representative Reuben Warshawsky (a sharp and edgy Ron Leibman) to win the work force over.

Maybe it really happened like that, but the impression lingers that the makers deliberately depersonalised the management figures ? who are all peripheral ? in order to enhance the heroic status of their lead character.

Warshawsky, with the help of Norma Rae, finds it tough going to convert the workers, attracting a group of only seventeen out of 800. Presumably this is because of the worker's fears of repercussions from the management, but again this is never really made clear, and there is little feeling of the awakening of a sleeping giant as the call for an organised union grows: one minute there are just a handful of recruits, the next the whole workforce is downing tools as Norma is hauled off to prison.

This is in keeping with the jarring compression of the time scale in which the story takes place.