Movies worth renting

Bread and Roses

Ken Loach
Studio Entertainment 06/01 VHS/DVD
R - strong language, brief nudity

Every night of the week, a legion of people enter the skyscrapers of American cities and clean the offices of large companies. They remain "invisible" people, nameless and faceless to most of us, these service workers on the bottom of the economic ladder. In a world of money, politics, and power, they are not even factored into the game.

Ken Loach, whose politically engaging films include My Name Is Joe, Carla's Song, and Land and Freedom, has crafted a riveting drama about some Latino janitors and cleaners in Los Angeles. Open your heart to this film, and you will encounter what it is like for some oppressed individuals to express their righteous indignation and to seek a just recompense for their labors. As you sense the director's moral outrage over their working conditions, let your own emotions bring you to a point of empathy. As Robert Solomon once wrote: "Justice is not an ideal state or theory but a matter of personal sensibility, a set of emotions that engage us with the world and make us care."

Maya (Pillar Padilla) leaves Mexico and slips across the border to the United States in search of a better life. In Los Angeles, she moves in with her older sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo) and her husband Bert (Jack McGee). First she gets a job at a bar. When she is sexually harassed there, this fiery young woman seeks employment at Angel Cleaning Company where her sister works. Perez (George Lopez), her boss, takes a "commission" of her first month's salary as payment for his kindness in giving her a job cleaning offices.

Sam Shapiro (Adrien Brody), a colorful union organizer and activist who enjoys shaking up corporate America, wants the workers in Maya's building to join a union. She is immediately attracted to his passion for the cause. He points out that years ago janitors were earning $8.50 an hour with health insurance whereas now they take home $5.75 an hour and have no health insurance, sick days, overtime, or holiday pay.

Although many of Maya's co-workers are frightened of losing their jobs and being deported, she is motivated to work for change when Perez fires an elderly woman for being late. She wants Reuben (Alonso Chavez), an earnest young man she's dating, to join her but he has won a scholarship to law school and needs the money from his job to cinch this opportunity.

Maya grows closer to Sam. She is especially impressed when he disrupts the building manager's lunch at a fancy restaurant and organizes the workers to crash a party in the building celebrating the merger between Hollywood lawyers and another firm. Both of these actions are designed to embarrass the cleaning company by spotlighting the janitors' right to better wages and health benefits.

Based on a real-life Justice for Janitors campaign in Los Angeles in 1990, Bread and Roses vividly demonstrates the horrible inequities between those who work in the city's offices and those who clean them. It is exciting to watch Maya's empowerment through political action. Some of the fire of her transformation is squelched by a scary encounter with her sister during which she angrily reveals what she was forced to do to provide for Maya and the rest of their family in Mexico. Ken Loach refuses to give us a fairy tale ending where everything is nicely wrapped together in a victory for the downtrodden.

Watching this film, we were reminded of a piece of advice given by Dom Helder Camara, a Latin American liberation theologian: "We must carry a reverence for justice as a mother carries a reverence to her unborn child." Ken Loach has done that. His passion for social justice shines through the experiences of these Latino characters and ignites our hearts.

 

 

The Grapes of Wrath

The Grapes of Wrath (1940) is director John Ford's most famous black and white epic drama - the classic adaptation of John Steinbeck's 1940 Pulitzer Prize-winning, widely-read 1939 novel. [The sentimental film is much more closely related to Ford's social protest dramas, The Informer (1935) and How Green Was My Valley (1941) than to his magisterial Westerns.] It was remarkable that Ford, a staunch and conservative Republican Party member, made this film - the most popular left-leaning, socialistic-themed film of pre-World War II Hollywood.

The title of the film was taken from the Battle Hymn of the Republic, by Julia Ward Howe ("Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord, He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored, He has loosed the fateful lightning of His terrible swift sword, His truth is marching on"). On the screen, the film honestly and realistically recreates the socio-economic impact of the Great Depression and a mid-30s drought upon one representative family - the Joads. Its theme of an oppressed people's epic move to a new home parallels the Biblical story of Exodus. Their family name, Joad, also evokes the Biblical character of Job.

Nunnally Johnson's screenplay is remarkably faithful to its Steinbeck source material. Not present in the novel or the screenplay is a tacked-on ending in the film that optimistically and sentimentally affirms the strength and human dignity of the individual spirit. Numerous other times, Hollywood has capitalized on other Steinbeck works and adapted them for the screen: Of Mice and Men (1939), Tortilla Flat (1942), The Moon is Down (1943), The Pearl (1948), The Red Pony (1949), East of Eden (1955), and Cannery Row (1982).

There were a total of seven Academy Award nominations for the film - with two wins: Best Supporting Actress (Jane Darwell) for her role as the archetypal mother figure, and Best Director (John Ford). The other five nominations were Best Picture (that lost to Hitchcock's Rebecca), Best Actor (Henry Fonda in one of his greatest film roles), Best Screenplay (Nunnally Johnson), Best Sound Recording, and Best Film Editing. In the same year, when ten Best Pictures were nominated, director Ford had another entry: The Long Voyage Home (1940). A year earlier, Lewis Milestone directed another adaptation of a classic John Steinbeck novel, the tragedy Of Mice and Men (1939), with five Oscar nominations and no wins.

The plight of the Joad family is universalized as a microcosm of the thousands of other tenant farmers during the country's time of crisis, who suffered from oppression imposed by the banks and big mechanized farm interests. The dispossessed, migrant family's departure from their windy and dusty land, and their slow disintegration provides insight into the thousands of Oklahoma, Colorado, Texas Panhandle, and W. Kansas families who were evicted and uprooted from their "Dust Bowl" farm land, and forced to search westward in the inhospitable Eden of California for jobs and survival with thousands of other migrant workers.

Jane Darwell is marvelous (although her accent is inappropriate) as the strong center and backbone of the migratory family that must leave its ancestral land, and Henry Fonda is magnificent as an unmercifully-harrassed Okie who refuses to be beaten and crushed by misfortune. The film's themes include the central importance of the family, the suffering and oppression of the farmers, the hollowness of the American Dream, the display of human dignity and spirit in the face of adversity, and issues of social and economic justice. Original casting for the film called for Beulah Bondi as Ma Joad, James Stewart as Al, and Walter Brennan as Pa Joad.

Filmed in journalistic, documentary-style black and white textures with some low-key lighting and chiaroscuro (often provided by a candle or low light source) - beautifully captured by Gregg Toland's expert cinematography (remarkably un-nominated!), the picture records with astute realism rural America in the 30s. [One year earlier, Toland had been cinematographer for Wuthering Heights (1939), and a year later, he completed the cinematography on Citizen Kane (1941), often regarded as the best film ever made.] Toland's visual images in this film resemble the migrant worker photographs taken by still photographer Dorothea Lange during the Depression. And the musical score by Alfred Newman used variations of "Red River Valley" to give the film added flavor.

It is truly ironic that Peter Fonda, the son of the film's main star, paralleled his father's role in The Grapes of Wrath in his own starring role in Easy Rider (1969) as Wyatt - another independent, heroic, wandering nomad across the Southwest US in a frustrated pursuit of dreams and a better, more idyllic life. However, in pursuit of the 'American dream,' similar to the Joad family's quest, he travels from California (the supposed land of opportunity) to New Orleans - in the opposite direction.

 

 

Matewan

John Sayles the director and screenwriter of Matewan the movie as the Hardshell Preacher.

David Strathairn as Sid Hatfield, the police chief of Matewan, West Virginia, on the "streets" of Thurmond, West Virginia the location of the "town  filming" of Matewan

Chris Cooper as Joe Kenehan, Joe Grifasi as Fausto, and James Earl Jones as Few Clothes walk with determination down a plank path in the strikers' tent camp.

Hazel Dickens as the mountain woman.

Jo Henderson as Mrs. Elkins in an "act" of solidarity with the wife of the leader of the Italian striking miners.

 

 

Norma Rae (1979)

Set in the industrial South and based on a true story, Martin Ritt’s NORMA RAE is a moving portrait of a woman’s fight to improve both her own life and the deplorable conditions that exist in the mill where she works. Norma Rae (Sally Field) has worked at the textile mill for years, but when a union organizer from New York comes to town, Norma takes on the hostility of the mill’s management and the apathy of her coworkers to try to unionize the mill. Field plays Norma Rae as a passionate woman who realizes her own potential and her need to rebel against the status quo. She is also infuriated by the conditions at the mill. When Norma, uneducated and poor, finally expresses her disgust with life at the mill, it is an electrifying moment, and Field radiates this energy for the rest of the film, providing an emotional core and drive that gives the picture its power.

Extras

Filmed on location in Opelika, Alabama.

The film is based on the true story of Crystal Lee Jordan, who had been blacklisted by every textile union in the South for her fight against the conditions at those mills. However, with the success of NORMA RAE, Jordan began a new career as a spokeswoman for a textile workers union.

The theme song, "It Goes Like it Goes," was sung by Jennifer Warnes.

The film was originally rated R by the MPAA but won a PG on appeal.

 

 

The Dollmaker

1984, Drama, TV

Jane Fonda won the Emmy for her portrayal of Gertie, a Kentucky hills woman who strives to find freedom, individuality, and hope when her family relocates to Detroit during World War II and her new home is in the bleak, misnamed neighborhood of Merry Hill.