Look for the union label. pbs.org
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I've already told you how we greenies can and should learn from the labor movement but how about a union-themed movie classic as a path toward activist inspiration? Read on...
Name the best-known early 1950s film with a union theme? Easy. That would be On the Waterfront. But Waterfront was not the early 1950s film with a union theme that none other than Noam Chomsky called, "one of the greatest films ever made" about which he also said he "couldn't get it out of my mind for weeks." That would be the sadly neglected 1953 film, Salt of the Earth.
Made by a group of McCarthy-era, blacklisted filmmakers, Salt of the Earth tells the story of New Mexico zinc miners
"Shortly after the strike had begun, an injunction prohibited men from walking the picket lines," writes[url='http://www.peoplesworld.org/salt-of-the-earth-continues-to-inspire'] Tony Pecinovsky in[i] People's Weekly World. "Women soon replaced their brothers, sons, husbands and fathers
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Equally as impressive is the manner in which revolutionary film was completed against all odds. Production began on January 20, 1953 and the Hollywood Reporter soon announced: "H'wood Reds are shooting a feature-length anti-American racial issue propaganda movie." The outcry carried all the way to Congress where Donald Jackson, a member of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), promised: "I shall do everything in my power to prevent the showing of a communist-made film in the theaters of America." Rosaura Revueltas, the woman who played Esperanza, was deported to Mexico during production on a trumped-up immigration charge (her passport hadn't been stamped upon entering the U.S.).
"The film's director, Herbert Biberman, spent six months in jail for refusing to testify before HUAC," adds Pecinovsky. "Several key personnel on the film were found in contempt of Congress when they refused HUAC's badgering as well. The film crew was barred from laboratories, sound studios, and other facilities normally used by filmmakers. No Hollywood labs would process the film and the projectionist's union refused to show it."
Salt of the Earth made its theatrical debut in March 1954 and won the International Grand Prize from the Academie du Cinema de Paris in 1955. Like the characters in the film and the real-life workers those characters were based on, the filmmakers had emerged triumphant in what Pecinovsky calls a story "about racism, sexism, chauvinism, red-baiting, union busting, censorship and courage; the courage of ordinary people, workers and filmmakers, standing together in solidarity." Deborah Rosenfelt, author of a book about the film, has written:
[i]The continuing significance of Salt of the Earth for our own time arises from its attempt
