Welcome to Reasonable Movies, the new subsection of An Appeal to Reason. In this newsletters, I will be posting movie recommendations and reviews on Fridays, to give you some entertainment options for your weekend. As I have created it as a subsection, if you are not interested, I believe you can unsubscribe to this section and still remain subscribed to the main newsletter and vice versa. Subsections are a new feature on Substack, so I’m not sure exactly how they work but I’m trying it out with this additional newsletter.
For this first edition, I’ve chosen a real classic working class movie - Salt of the Earth. It is available for free at YouTube at the above link and also through Kanopy, a free streaming service that you might be able to access with a card at your local library. Not all my recommendations will be through free services, but I will do my best to post free when available.
Salt of the Earth tells the tale of a strike at a Zinc mine in New Mexico. While the events in the movie are somewhat fictionalized, they are based on the Empire Zinc Strike and the Local 890 union participated in the making of the film. Many of the actors in the film were community members who had participated in the strike. It was directed by Herbert Biberman,, written by Michael Wilson, and produced by Paul Jarrico, all three of whom had been blacklisted by Hollywood for being communists. The lead actress, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported to Mexico during the filming. According to the Los Angeles Times, “‘Salt of the Earth’ was so thoroughly suppressed on its release in 1954 that some film historians call it the only blacklisted American movie.” It was only shown in a few theatres in the United States, though it received acclamation internationally winning awards in France and Czechoslovakia.
Enjoy watching - Salt of the Earth is a great tale of the class struggle and the labor movement.