Triumph and Tragedy

The only U.S. film to be blacklisted, Salt of the Earth finally makes its debut on home video.

by Tom Barr | Published January 5, 1994

In 1954 two exceptional films on organized labor were produced. Elia Kazan's On The Waterfront worn innumerable awards and is often recognized as one of the best films of the decade.

The other, Salt of the Earth, was boycotted by virtually every theater in the nation, and has seldom been seen anywhere. Like Kazan's film, it earned a place in history. According to the video liner box, it is the only United States film that was blacklisted. The reason: most of its cast and crew were blacklisted because they refused to testily before the Un-American Activities Committee and reveal co-workers who had had Communist Party affiliations.

Partially financed by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Salt of the Earth is a remarkable film which was several years ahead of its time. Using a largely non-professional cast, it made a plea for economic and sexual equality years before these issues made front page headlines.

The film tells a simple, straightforward story of the struggle by Mexican workers in a New Mexico mining community to achieve better working and living conditions. Narrated by a woman, it sends a strong message of human dignity and freedom, and raises some social issues which remain virtually unchanged today.

When the workers strike, the mining company obtains a court injunction ordering them to stop picketing. If they comply, the strike will be lost; if they continue, picketers will be arrested and fined, and the strike will still fail.

In the Union meeting that follows, a woman points out that the injunction prohibits only striking miners from picketing. The strike will not be broken if women take over the picketing. In the ensuing discussion, one of the miners says "We can't think of them as housewives. We have to think of them as partners." Another replies, "Brothers don't count enough on their women; bosses don't count on them at all."

As the strike continues for six months, tensions build. The corporation bans striking workers from purchasing food at the company store. and male-female roles are reversed. Men are forced to watch helplessly from the sidelines as women are harassed by sheriff's deputies, and they undertake the traditional women's roles of doing the laundry. preparing meals, mid eating for children. When the central character is denied public assistance because lie onlN' has three children to teed. it reminds arc that some things still haven't changed very much. Many of today's unemployed have tried to obtain food stamps and other services only to be told that they are not poor enough to qualify.

Attempting to break the picketers, sheriff Will Geer, has his deputies ram the line with cars. A woman is hurt and a brief scuffle follows, but the line continues, and grows in strength. As a last resort, he orders them to "get off the picket line or get arrested." They refuse and are taken to jail. Realizing they will prevail, and worrying about lost profits, the company agrees to compromise.

In lesser hands, this might have become bad, inept melodrama or a strident treatise with a too-pat ending. Michael Wilson had an excellent ear for dialogue, and crafted a lean screen play featuring quiet, sensitive narration by Rosaura Revueltas, who was one of the cast's few professionals.

The production was filmed in black and white in what looks to be a real miner's village set on a southwestern desert. As it unfolds one has the feeling of watching documentary footage of an actual strike as it is transpires. The ending is a much more logical and believable conclusion than in Kazan's film, which built to a climax with a bruising fight between dock worker Marlon Brando and waterfront boss Lee J. Cobb.

Much of the credit goes to director Herbert Biberman, who guided his cast of unknown professionals and amateurs to uniformly good performances. Knowing that many of them were not professionals, there is a tendency to try to pick out the pros from the firsttimers. When the credit roll at the end identifies the two groups, this viewer had guessed wrong in virtually every case. The reason: everyone is so right for their part and speaks dialogue so realistically that it is difficult to imagine them as anything other than the characters they are portraying.

If the film has a flaw, it is that it moves rather slowly. But to have quickened the pace would have destroyed the sense of watching a documentary.

Cult Movies II has said, "No American film is more inspiring and emotionally satisfying than this remarkable 1954 film." Biberman's triumph was in simply getting his film made. The tragedy is that it took almost 40 years before it became available on MPI Home Video so everyone can see it.

As such, it is an enduring statement of the quest for human dignity. It is also a sad reminder of the time when America submitted to fear, and by doing so, suppressed a voice that was fighting for fundamental principals which were theoretically guaranteed when the nation was founded. MM

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