RamonTrump Idiot Sally Field looks OK, not enough to get more than a 1 rating. These JEW Commies, they went down south to "save" "The People". They went down to bring the idiots under ONE UMBRELLA, ONE VOICE, gee I wonder who controlled that voice.I wonder what happened to the factories after they workers were "helped" by the JEW Commie Rabble Rousers.

dougdoepke That booming factory floor projects all the deafening sounds of a WWI artillery barrage. Why all the workers aren't deaf amounts to a puzzler. Gutsy movie. I like the main theme. The drive to unionize not only benefits the community but brings out Norma Rae's otherwise hidden potential, not only as a person but as a leader. Revealingly, it's the Jewish outsider and organizer who triggers that potential. Otherwise, the 31-year old is caught up in drifting aimlessly through life, a human cog in the mill's inhuman machinery. Men hit on her producing three illegitimate kids, while she lives at home with her parents. But what the heck, she's just blending in with the prevailing company town. Of course, all that alters once she stops being a passive vessel and begins to think about why things have to be the way they are. I'm really surprised the screenplay makes the "trouble-making" organizer a New York Jew since that directs attention onto certain stereotypes. Still, it's a gutsy move and provides good banter as Norma Rae's southern rural seeks commonality with Reuben's eastern urban. I also like the way the screenplay refuses to vilify the company officers. That would be too easy and cheap. After all, they're cogs too, only at a higher and better-paid level. Actually, the movie and its themes remind me of the classic labor movie Salt of the Earth (1953). Unfortunately, that McCarthy-era film was withheld for years because of its supposed subversive content. Nonetheless, the theme of the individual growing through labor betterment is quite similar to Norma Rae's. And if anyone can find material that goes beyond reformist liberalism in either film, I'd like to see it.Anyway, Field proves she's a lot more than a singing nun or a frolicking beach bunny. I'm glad they cast someone petite like her and refused any hint of glamor. Seeing her small, plain frame stand up to the hulking men shows the power of personal conviction, whether male or female. All in all, the movie's a fine effort at showing the historical dynamic behind a laboring class pushing upwards to the proverbial middle. And if, as a result, manufacture looks for replacement through offshoring or mechanizing, then deeper questions than the worthy Norma Rae need raising.

Emerson De Klotz Contemporary historians consider the 1970's a "pivot of change" in world history due to an engaging wave of social progressivism within the Western World. Amidst economic and societal reforms, tides to unionize factory workers had washed over from shores of the 1880's Knights of Labor, only to crash onto rocky beaches of the 1970's unfair labor conditions. "Norma Rae" is based on the story of Crystal Lee Sutton's life as a textile laborer, working beneath employers in a poor environment, that stands up to obtuse societal normalities. The film does a surprising job at portraying the struggles faced when unionizing is attempted. Unbeknownst to most, a dream to unionize often separates a reformer, as well as creates opposite factions within a community. These two factions, those who want change compared to those who are content with the status quo, are depicted very well in the film via Reuben Warshowsky, a labor activist who supports progression, and the textile factory owners, who promote disdain and contempt towards reform. The film instills a sense of pro-unionism within a viewer, which isn't bad-actually, quite the contrary-it's good! "Norma Rae" does a fantastic job at revealing injustices, and promoting a positive cause. To the films disadvantage, it fails to address other problems facing labor unions outside of the factory. Rather ironic, given the movie focuses on unionization, yet fails to unite other platforms for labor progression. This inability does NOT downplay the great screen writing or acting produced, but it fails to communicate different forms of injustice surrounding labor. While focusing on changes in the factory, the film fails to represent problems facing migrant workers in the west along with mining industry in the northeast. The most powerful scene from the film is the dramatization of Crystal Lee Sutton's actual protest, in the mill, where she creates a sign reading "UNION" and stands on her worktable until all machines slow to a silence. Alongside other meaningful scenes, including confrontations with her family, protagonist Norma Rae (a representation of Crystal Lee Sutton) literally taking a stand against injustice in the workplace in both historically significant as well as emotionally. In total, "Norma Rae" works on all levels with the means to tell an amazing story, along with the ability to support a just cause.

sylvain-14 It's only after talking through the movie's perplexing character arcs and symbols with a friend that I realized it offered, potentially at least, a much deeper reading that suggested a murky darkness lurking behind human goals, as we strive to make sense of our positions, be they static or transient.On the surface, Norma Rae is a delicate story about empowerment and heroic triumph, that trumpets the self evident values of Union-organizing in poverty stricken rural America. "Feels good," right? But then, we can peel the layers of the onion and we see emerging a fatalistic portrait of the savior myth, amid a hopelessly static universe where the protagonists perform a dance, each their own, from which they will never escape.The film is complex indeed, and with great stealth, managed to lay its message dormant through many years, awards and praises, and many layers of American denial and self imposed censorship of its own dissenting views.There's a very symbolic shot in a deserted church, early on in the film, when Reuben Warshowsky, a union organizer newly arrived from New York, sits alone with his back against the wall and we can clearly see that the art department has staged the casting of the shadow of the cross next to him. If we assume for a moment that nothing at the movies is really an accident (nothing like this anyway), we might infer that on a symbolic level, Warshowsky who is a Jew, an outsider, represents the savior archetype that Norma Rae, the eponymous protagonist has been yearning for.She lives a hopeless life from which she has never ventured out, and never will, but the arrival of Warshowsky seems to focus her pain and help articulate both a definition of a problem and its cure, as in any archetypal cult experience. And indeed, once we look past the veneer of apparent pro-Union propaganda which the film uses to masquerade its way into mainstream acceptability, it is easy to distinguish that Union-organizing is portrayed much like the tedious seduction of cult members, from one box into another box, as they abdicate self-interest in support of a greater force. The film makers never inscribe a larger context from which we can comprehend the ills of Capitalism, or the need to escape the inherent slavery of menial factory work, but instead, they insidiously move their characters around the chess board as if to show that they need one another to continue their compulsive dance. One passes through towns, ministering the good word, building concepts, printing leaflets, the other fuels dreams of transgression, of faraway exotic places, and finally of marriage offers that keep her safely fastened to her neurosis. Neither factory nor Union proposes to rescue the sinking human heart from its ghostly, zombified inertia, or from its constant uprooting, as the case may be, but the characters in this play use one another to express their personal drama and their attachment to it. They meet at a crossroad, and ultimately at cross purposes. One second, Norma Rae gleefully boasts "Rueben, I think you like me," but moments and a handshake later, she may realize that she never for her moment found her footing.Midway through the film, at a worker's meeting, a woman played by a younger Grace Zabriskie laments that her husband has died and offers for the congregation to take some of his clothes off her hands; the plea is delicate and tender. A second later, Warchowsky, in a blunt edit, sighs "I'm not getting my message across!" He has no care for the heart of these people; he is ministering, and he will pass through these parts when he has handed over his burden to an heir. But once he's gone, what will remain of the spirit, the cause, and the Holy Grail? What myth will sustain to remind the town of its passing savior?Will we stand at the end of the road, stunned at the gaping hole he left behind once he took away the names of our ills and the jars containing the cure?