Saturday, June 18, 2005

David Denby

“. . . . Norma Rae . . . has been formed by women's-movement perceptions without being burdened by women's-movement rhetoric. A lifetime factory worker and the mother of two children (one illegitimate), Norma Rae is an openly sexual woman who is also instinctively rebellious. She's a very large personality, and when she takes political action without turning into a saint or a boring great lady, she becomes a modern movie heroine (pint-size but full of spit), which is what American movies need more than anything else at the moment….

“Casting Sally Field in a serious dramatic role was commercially shrewd and dramatically sound. With her wiry little body, Moreau-like down-turned mouth, and rumpled manner, she has always been easy to like; a relaxed, plain-speaking, funny woman, she's not glamorous and haughty like an old-fashioned star or clenced and hyper-conscious in the new Glenda Jackson-Jane Fonda style. She seemed to be enjoying herself in her frivolous pictures with Burt Reynolds, but obviously she needed to break away from him and the car-chase, male-showoff genre he works in (known in the industry as "tits-and-tire pictures"). Not yet an inventive actress, she relies too much on humorous grouchiness and slumping shoulders, and she stiffens up a bit in quiet, serious moments. But this is still a funny, tremendously affecting performance, with moments of startling anger and power.

“…. In the opening scene, Norma Rae is angry but helpless. She tells a company doctor that her elderly mother has been deafened by the incessant racket of the plant machinery, and when the man says that it's nothing, it will go away, Field's face crumples and she lets out a high-pitched wail of complaint. Her Norma Rae definitely isn't ladylike: She's hot and sweaty most of the time, and she can't keep her hair in place or her shirt dry; she works too much and has to put up with a couple of kids and a father jealous of her boyfriends (her husband is dead). A permanently sullen and exhausted expression has settled on her face, partly because she doesn't have much self-respect, and that bothers her more than anything else. As we can see, men have always pushed her around and she's been foolish enough (or masochistic enough) to let them get away with it. Isn't that the way a good ol' girl is supposed to behave?

“A street-smart New York Jew named Reuben Warshovsky (Leibman) bullies her into self-respect. He awakens her--not sexually (she doesn't need that), but morally, spiritually. "You'll be a mensh," he tells her, turning her into a union organizer….

“[review copy incomplete] What stays with the viewer is the image of the rueful angry woman. Sally Field has one scene that should become famous. When Norma Rae's new husband … complains that her political activities are taking her away from her housework and that he's not getting enough food or enough love, Sally Field traverses the kitchen in a continuous movement of weary disgust, dropping some food into a pot and the laundry into a sink, and after grimly taking her station at the ironing board, she invites her husband to raise her nightie and make love. This is the married woman's primal scene, done as bitter farce, and it brings the house down. Ritt may be an old-time liberal, but he certainly knows when a new mood has ripened.”

David Denby
New York, March 12, 1979

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