Norma Rae (1979, Martin Ritt)

If Norma Rae had been a sleeper or "undiscovered gem" I'd probably have seen it long ago, but it's an Oscar-winner and I can't deny sometimes turning my nose up at such films.  My loss.  I finally saw Martin Ritt's rousing and intelligent drama last night via Fox's new Blu-ray, which sports a very film-like image.  Sally Field deservedly won her first Academy Award for Best Actress in the title role, a small town North Carolina factory worker who bravely works with a New York labor organizer (an excellent Ron Leibman) to unionize the textile mill where she and most of her fellow townspeople have slaved away for generations, under terrible conditions.

Inspired by the story of textile worker Cheryl Lee Sutton, Ritt's film is one of the great progressive films to somehow escape from Hollywood into the marketplace...it's strongly pro-worker, pro-women, and advocates for cooperation and camaraderie amongst people of different racial, ethnic, religious, social, and geographic backgrounds.  Like James Bridges' The China Syndrome, also released in 1979, it is an impassioned cry against injustices perpetrated by a powerful, established foe--in this case, management and big business.  Both films have strong female protagonists (Jane Fonda in China Syndrome) who become more radicalized and learn to fight as the films progress.  With the Reagan era just around the corner, it's a minor miracle that these uncompromising, undeniably left-leaning, cinematic indictments of the establishment were even greenlit.

I can't say I was ever a big fan of Field's, but then with one role--Norma Rae, in this case--I was completely won over. She's thoroughly convincing as a single mother from the Deep South, with minimal education, an active (and unfairly maligned) sex life, a rebellious streak, toughness, and a willingness and desire to step outside her comfort zone in order to better herself and her loved ones, i.e. trusting and teaming up with a Northern Jew in order to bring a union to the factory.

I never felt like Field was acting here or having to try very hard to affect a working-class brio; it seems to come naturally to her and I felt that this "organic" quality extended to the rest of the film.  Ritt and screenwriters Harriet Frank, Jr. and Irving Ravetch do a fine a job of not beating their message over viewers' heads.  I think of it as a more of a massage, in comparison to others in the same canon such as Erin Brockovich, which I admittedly haven't seen in years, but which I recall as being much louder and less subtle.

Norma Rae is a smart, well-crafted piece, which doesn't resort to cheap tricks or get overly or falsely sentimental; these are things I can't always put exactly into words, but I know them when I see them and they are anathema to me.  As an example of the film's admirable restraint in this regard, composer David Shire is one of the best in his field, but his music is used sparingly here; to the film's credit, its most dramatic and moving moments play in a more documentary-like fashion, with very little non-diegetic sounds such as a dramatic score. In fact, the sound you will probably most remember after watching Norma Rae is that of the extremely loud factory machinery, which the characters are constantly competing with to be heard.  It's a nice analogy for the overall narrative, if you like that sort of thing.

The fine supporting cast includes the aforementioned Leibman, who should have gotten some Supporting Actor nominations for his work here.  Leibman has many fine moments in the film, none more so than his moving, chivalrous farewell scene with Field, which confounds not only audience expectations, but also Norma Rae's.

As Norma Rae's dim, but decent new husband, Beau Bridges has less screen time than Leibman, though he is, as always, a welcome presence.  I got a kick out of the scene where he bemoans Norma Rae holding a union meeting in their home, particularly because there are black men attending, all while wearing a t-shirt with a faded Woodstock logo...this dichotomy is apt for his character, who is looser and more liberal than most folks in their staunchly Baptist town, but who will not cross all the lines that Norma Rae is willing to.

Sharp-eyed viewers will note that Field's onscreen time with Beau, was sandwiched by love interest roles with brother Jeff in Bob Rafelson's Stay Hungry and Robert Mulligan's Kiss Me Goodbye. Almost romantic rivals in Norma Rae, Leibman and Bridges earlier played best pals in Douglas Schwartz's 1973 buddy road movie Your Three Minutes Are Up!.

There's no shortage of top '70s character talent filling out the rest of the cast, a number of whom are sadly no longer with us: Pat Hingle, Barbara Baxley, Gail Strickland, Bob Minor, Frank McRae, Morgan Paull, Noble Willingham, Gregory Walcott, James Luisi, John Calvin, and Grace Zabriskie (who would play a factory worker again a few years later in An Officer and a Gentleman), among others.  You might not recognize all of them by name, but you will know their faces.

Sutton apparently was not happy with the film at the time of its release, which is unfortunate because I think it's a beautiful tribute to her fighting spirit.  In a tragic example of history seeming to repeat itself, years later, she had to fight with her health insurance company in order to get coverage for the brain cancer that would eventually kill her, losing precious time to start her medical treatments.

In addition to composer Shire, notable tech credits belong to editor Sidney Levin (Nashville, Mean Streets, and several other Ritt titles) and d.p. John A. Alonzo (Chinatown, Scarface, Harold and Maude) who shot the film in the surprising (to me, anyway), but ultimately apt 'scope ratio; the extra wide 2.35:1 framing is ideal for the machinery and worker-filled factory floors where so much of the film is staged. The aforementioned Blu-ray does a superb job of recreating the original look of this film for home consumption.  There is no unsightly grain reduction or over-brightening.  It was an ideal way to get acquainted with this exceptional film.

Field has often been ridiculed because of her "You like me!" speech when accepting the Oscar for Best Actress for Places in the Heart.  That said, I think her acceptance speech for Norma Rae, like her performance in the film, is right on...she is genuinely appreciative of everyone who helped her earn that award, and it's quite moving as far as these types of speeches go.

The Baby Maker (1970, James Bridges)

It's unfortunate that Barbara Hershey's early career was dogged by bad publicity relating to her free-spirited ways and temporary name change to Barbara Seagull because it overshadowed her fine, early-career work in films such as Frank Perry's Last Summer, Paul Williams' Dealing, and James Bridges' The Baby Maker.  If and when the Warner Archive is able to locate the elements to properly restore Last Summer, they will have nearly cornered the market on the early feature films of Hershey, as they have already released the aforementioned Dealing and The Baby Maker, as well as Lee H. Katzin's Heaven With a Gun (Hershey's feature debut).

 
With that out of the way, I'd like to delve a little more into Bridges' The Baby Maker, as I'm a longtime admirer of this filmmaker and I've only recently--finally--caught up with, this, his first feature film.  In the title role is Hershey, playing a sweet-natured college dropout happily living in free love squalor with her layabout, aspiring leather craftsman boyfriend (a very young Scott Glenn in his feature debut)--what Peter Boyle's Joe would disdainfully refer to as "HIPPIES!"--in a ramshackle Santa Monica (I believe) apartment / storefront.  Hershey's Tish is matched up by elderly fixer Mrs. Culnick (Lili Valenty) with square, upper-middle class couple Suzanne and Jay Wilcox (Collin Wilcox and Sam Groom) to carry Jay's baby.  What could easily come off exploitative and sleazy, is instead handled with a lot of sensitivity and nuance. 

The then-new concept of surrogate motherhood is no longer envelope-pushing, nor does the suburbanite vs. hippie dynamic carry the same weight, but these aspects are still fascinating to me in an anthropological sort of way.  Unlike, say, Clint Eastwood's Breezy, though, Bridges' portrayal of the youth culture feels more knowing and even-handed.  More importantly, in spite of these dated elements, Bridges' story, characters, sense of place, and knack for convincingly realistic depictions of SoCal folk remain in full force over 40 years later.  Tish's maturation, her growing bond with Suzanne and Jay, and her burgeoning personal strength...the way these things were portrayed by Hershey and Bridges was incredibly moving to me.  Forgive the hyperbole, but Hershey is incandescent here.  It's a great, unsung performance.  We've seen many birth scenes dramatized over the years, but I can't recall an actress so convincingly portraying the pain of childbirth and truly putting aside personal vanity, as Hershey does here.  This is the first of Bridges' progressively-conceived and well-written female leads, followed by the likes of Jane Fonda in The China Syndrome, Debra Winger in Mike's Murder, and Jamie Lee Curtis in Perfect.

Now, after I've just listed Tish as one of Bridges' strong female characters, I'll take a step backward for a moment to comment on just how naturally beautiful Hershey is in this film...it's enough to make me genuinely sad that it was Hershey who would be credited with the collagen implant craze, when she had her lips injected for Beaches.

The rest of the cast is superb as well, with Groom and the late Wilcox (who also appeared in Bridges' September 30, 1955) registering quite strongly after they initially appear as stiff as their characters, but it's due to their abilities and Bridges' tendency to dispel stereotypes, that they emerge well-rounded and quite sympathetic.

Bridges deserves credit for unearthing Glenn, who appears startlingly young and beautiful here, for this, his actual film debut, and then--years later--when Glenn emerged from a two-year hiatus from Hollywood in Bridges' Urban Cowboy, the "debut" of the second, more fruitful part of his onscreen career.  Glenn is alternately charming and abhorrent as Tad, reflecting the oft-mentioned (by me, anyway) New American Cinema brand of realism and honesty...may it rest in peace.

Glenn and Hershey hang out on Santa Monica Pier years before Hershey's harrowing moments there with Michael Douglas in Falling Down.

Some other noteworthy Bridges-ian things that I liked in The Baby Maker:

* Valenty's Mrs. Culnick, an elderly, wealthy, and forward-thinking mother figure of unsaid European (possibly Jewish) origin who lives alone in a fancy house in the hills and has connections with the hippie counterculture.  It is through Tish's radical friend Charlotte (Jeannie Berlin) that Mrs. Culnick meets Tish.  Seeing the underclass Tish visit Mrs. Culnick's posh house high above the city is reminiscent of underclass Mike sleeping at motherly music producer Paul Winfield's mountaintop manse in Bridges' Mike's Murder.  Like Winfield's character (based on Winfield himself), I suspect Mrs. Culnick is also based on someone Bridges knew in real life.

* The experimental movie and flashing light-watching party attended by Tish, Tad, and assorted other riffraff, which is like the 1970 equivalent of the punk / New Wave performance art party put on by Richard (Dan Shor) in Mike's Murder.

Odds and Ends:

*Part of the aforementioned "anthropological" stuff: I really enjoyed and must mention the scenes with Berlin's Charlotte and her fellow commune dwellers, particularly the piece of agitprop anti-gun public theater that they stage outside of a toy store.

*It's been awhile since I've watched Cisco Pike with Kristoffersen, Hackman, and Black, but, as I recall it, Kris and Karen's Venice Beach grungy abode reminds me of Scott and Barbara's pad.  There's lot of interesting-looking locations in The Baby Maker, something Angelinos should have a fun time spotting and ID'ing, which I can't do with any authority, being a New Yorker.

*'70s Hollywood aficionados will appreciate the appearance of Helena Kallianotes, belly dancer (which she demonstrates in The Baby Maker) and sometime actress.  She's in the famed diner scene in Five Easy Pieces, William Castle's Shanks, Rafelson's Stay Hungry and Head, and a few others.

*Future Motel Hell and CHiPs co-star Paul Linke appears in a couple of amusing scenes as one of Glenn's whacked-out pals.

Befitting its low-budget origins with another studio (National General), it's unsurprising that the Warner Archive's no-frills DVD-R comes from an un-restored, aged source.  Almost looks like a release print, but I couldn't say anything definitively, of course.  It's in the correct OAR, which is good, and, frankly, I'm surprised this (unjustly) forgotten, low-profile film came so early in the Warner Archive timeline.  If not one of the initial releases of the label in March 2009, it's close.  Again, due to its non-WB origins, it's not surprising, though no less disappointing, that there is no original theatrical trailer attached to this DVD-R.  Overall, though, The Baby Maker is firmly in my wheelhouse so I hope some others check this disc out.  Now, someone please get that Bridges retrospective off the ground!

Driven to Tears: September 30, 1955

It's not very often that a film has me and has me with moist eyes not two minutes into its running time--on first viewing.  But, that was the case with James Bridges' September 30, 1955 (aka 9/30/55), an autobiographical tale that might be one of the most authentic and most perceptive portrayals of cinema obsession that I've seen captured in a narrative film, particularly one produced by a major studio.  Bridges' surrogate, Jimmy J. (Richard Thomas), a young college student in Arkansas is crazy about James Dean and his starring debut, East of Eden.  His friends, including his girlfriend, humor him, but don't really understand the connection he feels to Dean, how important his acting and persona are to the fatherless Jimmy J., and how losing one's personal hero can cut so deeply, even if one didn't really know him in the traditional sense.  When Dean is killed, Jimmy J. is devastated.  He and his former girlfriend Billie Jean (the late Lisa Blount), who feels the same way about Dean, lead the other kids in a night of seances and tributes in an effort to communicate with the spirit of Dean...with tragic results.

Bridges is the author of one my other favorite unsung films, Mike's Murder, and on the strength of these two pictures, along with his most popular titles (Urban Cowboy, The China Syndrome, The Paper Chase), the filmmaker who died prematurely at 57, possesses one of the more impressive, albeit small, directorial oeuvres that seemingly no one talks about.  Almost no one...Peter Tonguette did recently write a book on Bridges, and he and I agree that Mike's Murder and September 30, 1955, Bridges' most personal films, "are among the best movies of their era."  I read a comment on a Netflix customer review that aptly describes this film as "nailing the '50s like Dazed and Confused nailed the '70s" and I think that's a pretty good, accurate compliment.

I'm a little sorry it took me so long to get to September 30, 1955, as it spoke to me in a way that few films do and it most certainly would have had particularly strong meaning to me had I seen it when I was Jimmy J.'s age.  Having said that, I suspect this is a film that is very much one that will either be a revelation, as it was for me, or extremely tedious.  Jimmy J. watches and connects with movies and movie people in the way that cinephiles do and can identify in fellow cinephiles, but which normal folks shrug their shoulders at, or, worse, call "sick," as one character labels Jimmy J.  He's a dreamer, an obsessive, and borderline delusional, but I'm drawn to him in a way that I've been to other characters of similar ill repute such as The Swimmer's Ned Merrill.  Having grown up in a place where I had a very difficult time connecting with peers who shared my movie love and then dealing with the ensuing isolation, which was exacerbated by the premature loss of my father, I felt for Jimmy J. in a way that doesn't happen all the time and this rarity, in part, makes such instances all the more satisfying and powerful.

Bridges has made a picture, which might deceptively be labeled a "small film," but which portrays the pleasures of cinephilia, the fragility of youth, and loss with a sensitivity and certain kind of grandeur that is difficult to achieve.  Its evocation of '50s small town Americana is haunting and dreamlike, but not in a way that distracts or calls attention to itself.  Even with the use of certain dramatic devices and qualities that might seem counter to it, the film retains a subtlety and ambiguity that aligns it with the best films of its era.

September 30, 1955 opens with a glorious night shot of the marquee of the Conway Theater in downtown Conway, Arkansas, where the featured show is Kazan's East of Eden.  The Universal film than cuts to actual footage of the finale of Warner Bros.' East of Eden (although September 30, 1955 gives no credit or thanks to WB for the use of its footage).

Bridges' main character Jimmy J. (played magnificently by Thomas) watches the film by himself (for, what we later find out, is the 4th time) and Bridges and Gordon Willis' camera lingers on Jimmy as he intently watches the film, transfixed, sometimes smiling and laughing, and ultimately crying.  It's a beautiful opening to the film--and maybe its high point.  Perhaps because of my own, many, experiences alone in a movie house transported away from my real life by the world inside the screen, having that special experience of being one with the film, I found myself misty as I watched Jimmy getting choked up while watching his onscreen hero break down in the film within the film.

After the film, while the other patrons (mostly young couples) exit the theater, Jimmy, whose tears have dried, stops to admire and study the one-sheet for the film before he leaves the theater area entirely.  It's a very true, lovely little moment, which I can certainly relate to, and which I'm glad Bridges thought to include.  The one-sheet is a reminder, a representation, and a record of the film, particularly at a time (1955) when there would be no home video or downloadable iteration of the film to hold onto and collect, nor a mechanism to record a television broadcast, a broadcast which probably wouldn't happen for several more years.

Following a credits sequence that introduces the basic visuals of the small town Arkansas community where the film is set, the action moves to the campus of Arkansas State Teachers College (Bridges' real-life alma mater) where Jimmy J., in football uniform hears of the tragic death of his hero via radio broadcast.  From there, Jimmy is almost literally on the run, in his quest to not only memorialize his hero through ritual seances, but also through becoming more like him.  As Jimmy tells several people, he may not have known Dean personally, but the star's death has changed his life irrevocably.  Thomas,  again, as in the first scene in the movie theater, brilliantly conveys Jimmy J.'s sense of loss, confusion, and disbelief upon hearing of Dean's death.  Thomas really impresses with his ability to make you feel his character's inner tumult through facial expressions and body language.

Going to a liquor shop to attempt to pick up some drinks for his friends gives Jimmy a free moment to pore over the scant initial details of Dean's car accident in the local paper.  When he's refused service because he's underage, Jimmy J. steals the liquor, an act meant as much to benefit and impress his friends as it is for him to be more like his "rebel" hero.  While the script gives indications that Jimmy is sensitive and prone to unpredictable behavior prior to Dean's death, it isn't explicit about whether he previously engaged in criminal or rebellious behavior such as the theft of the liquor. In the course of the film Jimmy J. will tell both his girlfriends (Deborah Benson and Lisa Blount) of how similar he and Dean were, in terms of both Dean's actual biographical details, as well as those of the characters he played.

Proto-goth girl Billie Jean (Lisa Blount) is the only other person in their small town who understands Jimmy J.'s deep-seated connection to Dean and the only one who goes further than him in her devotion to the star, something that makes the rest of his friends dislike and feel threatened by her.  She helps push Jimmy J. to act out his obsession to her eventual, tragic detriment and possibly his own future tragedy.

"If only I felt like I belonged someplace."  Visiting the bedridden, burned Billie Jean, Jimmy J. has completed his transformation and is caught up in his story of seeing Rebel Without a Cause three times in Memphis so that he could properly remember all the details when the time came to tell her about it, stealing a lobby card for her,  and obtaining a new motorcycle and Dean wardrobe, complete with Rebel red jacket.

At the homecoming game, Jimmy J. finds himself on the other side of the fence in a different uniform than he had on at the start of the film.  Bridges and Jimmy J. seem ambiguous as to whether Jimmy J.'s self-imposed exile from his hometown and journey to Hollywood is a good thing.

We return to where it all started.  Dean has been squeezed out of the Conway marquee by Monroe and he's leaving Conway.  Is this how Bridges made his journey to Hollywood?

Bridges wisely hired Leonard Rosenman to score his film and the composer masterfully incorporated his still beautiful themes from East of Eden and Rebel Without a Cause to fit Jimmy J.'s narrative and character arc.  It's a great device because I assume I am probably not the only one who has found myself, at times, subconsciously scoring my life with the music of those films that live deep within my psyche.