Misfortunes of Imaginary Beings: 11/18/15

A blog formerly known as Bookishness / By Charles Matthews

"Dazzled by so many and such marvelous inventions, the people of Macondo ... became indignant over the living images that the prosperous merchant Bruno Crespi projected in the theater with the lion-head ticket windows, for a character who had died and was buried in one film and for whose misfortune tears had been shed would reappear alive and transformed into an Arab in the next one. The audience, who had paid two cents apiece to share the difficulties of the actors, would not tolerate that outlandish fraud and they broke up the seats. The mayor, at the urging of Bruno Crespi, explained in a proclamation that the cinema was a machine of illusions that did not merit the emotional outbursts of the audience. With that discouraging explanation many ... decided not to return to the movies, considering that they already had too many troubles of their own to weep over the acted-out misfortunes of imaginary beings."
--Gabriel García Márquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude

Wednesday, November 18, 2015

Norma Rae (Martin Ritt, 1979)

If Norma Rae were made today (which it wouldn't be), it would have to end with the owners closing the textile mill after the pro-union vote and shipping the jobs to Sri Lanka. Only two years after the movie was released, Ronald Reagan fired the striking air traffic controllers, giving impetus to the anti-union movement that persists to this day. Which is not just to say that Norma Rae is dated -- it was a bit that way at the time -- but that it persists in the memory largely because of Sally Field's breakthrough performance. It won her her first Oscar, and a well-deserved one: She carries the movie as few actresses have done before or since, freeing her from the trap that the TV series Gidget (1965-66) and The Flying Nun (1967-70) had caught her in. She had proved herself with the 1976 TV miniseries Sybil, for which she won an Emmy, but nothing demonstrated her ability to hold an audience in her grasp like Norma Rae. The screenplay by Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr. also earned an Oscar nomination, but it's scattered and sketchy, only touching lightly on the many elements of union organizing in the South -- racism, political chicanery, violence -- which are probably more important to understand than what the film focuses on: the grit and determination of one young textile worker and one stereotypically lefty Jewish organizer (Ron Leibman). Field has spoken of the difficulty faced by an actress even after she has won two Oscars -- her second was for Places in the Heart (Robert Benton, 1984) -- in finding challenging roles, and the career of Hilary Swank is a solid confirmation of that.