It’s a charming yet serious working-class feminist anthem, a far better one, in my view, than 9 to 5 . One of the best “Up and Out” films is Real Women Have Curves, set in East Los Angeles. The bittersweet comedy Breaking Away reminds us that university towns (in this case Bloomington, Indiana) are populated not just by transplanted professors and transient students but by working people, who may view the placid campuses in their hometowns as enemy territory. The early scenes in Coal Miner’s Daughter , filmed on location in the Kentucky hollers, faithfully capture the gritty details of coal town life, and Arkansas native musician-turned-actor Levon Helm is spot-on as Loretta Lynn’s hard-working father. They are, in other words, very often fairy tales, like the many updated Cinderella fantasies: Flashdance, Working Girl , Pretty Woman , Maid in Manhattan.īut there are some films in this category that depict working-class communities accurately, even though the main character eventually leaves them. UP AND OUTīig-budget Hollywood pictures featuring working-class leads are likely to be dramatizations of the American dream-what I call “Up and Out” films-in which characters escape, through spunk and determination, their lower-class circumstances. Most of my suggestions are available through online streaming services. To keep things manageable, I’ve excluded documentaries and foreign films. Here are my recommendations of some of the best that have come out since Norma Rae and Labor Notes debuted back in 1979. It is still possible, though, to find engaging and valuable movies about working people where labor/management conflict is not the central focus. Feature films expressly about class conflict have always been rare in American cinema, and in recent decades have become even more so. And on the big screen, Norma Rae proved to be a one-off. Now, over 40 years later, we know that the labor movement was not then surging but was on the cusp of collapse. At that moment, when more Americans than ever before were union members, it wasn’t surprising that a movie about a gutsy labor organizer would prove popular. This most iconic of union movies was a critical and box office smash when it came out in 1979, the same year Labor Notes published its first issue. If you search for films about labor, one makes every list: Norma Rae. This story was originally published by Labor Notes.
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