Award winning fight by woman

Press, 8 May 1980, Page 18

Award winning fight by woman

AT THE CINEMA

Hans Petrovic

The appearance of quite a few of this year’s Academy Award winning films is still eagerly awaited.

Among these, of course, is the five-Oscar winner, “Kramer vs Kramer,” which will quietly have to wait its turn until Woody Alien’s long running success, “Manhattan,” comes to an end at the Westend. Another that has received many inquries in “Norma Rae,” for which Sally Field won her best actress award. This is now scheduled to make its appearance at the Savoy Twin aS soon as the May school holiday season is over.

Out of town reports tells us that the film is suffused with humour and glows with warmth, even though a clash between two fiercely opposing trade union forces rages at its core.

Norma Rae (Field) is a .young mother battling to establish trade unionism in a southern textile state — and winning. A 31-year-old widow and mother of two, Norma toils by day in a factory where the working conditions are as low as her wages; and shring a home with her parents, her after-work life is as stifling as her job.

She enters into a marriage of mutual need with Sonny Webster Beau Bridges) who offers her the financial and emotional security that she has lacked in the past. But the turning point

for her (and the film) comes when she meets Reuben Warskovsky (Ron Leibman), a union organiser from New York. Impressed by his arguments in favour of setting up a branch of the Textile Workers’ Union in the factory, she begins to devote her life outside working hours to the union. Norma cares so much about her fellow-workers that she refuses to keep a higher-paying job because it involves reporting them to management for on-the-job performance and failures. The climax occurs when she is fired for attempting to take a copy of a threatening .<■ company notice. Tension mounts as the workers are forced to reach a decision as to whether to support her. Beyond the union theme, however, this is the story of a woman striving for fulfilment in agl aspects of her life. The screenplay was inspired by the true story of a souther woman.

The director (Martin Ritt), whose previous successes included the awardwinning “Hud,” observes that he has never seen a serious American film before about a working class woman.

“Norma Rae is about a gutsy, vulnerable, earthy lady — a fighter. My favourite type,” Ritt says. Field, who won several awards before the Oscar for her role, including the Cannes best actress award, says of the film: “It is the most creative thing that has happened to me in my life.”