Dear WGA members: the ultimate strike movie is Salt Of The Earth

Salt Of The Earth is a movie that sees around corners. Partly—but only partly— because of the current Hollywood writers’ strike, it also speaks loudly to our time. A strike movie about labor unrest in a mining town, Salt Of The Earth was generated by creatives who had approximately a thousand times more reason to be mad at the studio system than the current (justifiably aggrieved) WGA membership of today, so it would be enough to expect this exceptional pro-labor milestone to simply take on the bosses in black and white terms and leave it at that. The film’s producer, its director and its screenwriter were all blacklisted for their alleged communist sympathies at the time of production, and its leading lady was both blacklisted and deported halfway through filming. Given its difficult and politically motivated birth, Salt Of The Earth was suppressed when released, and wasn’t properly appreciated for 40 years.

But perhaps the most stunning aspect of this intermittently brilliant movie is that director Herbert J. Biberman, producer Paul Jarrico, and screenwriter Michael G. Wilson weren’t content to make a placard-bearing theme piece about labor strife. Full-throated and cleanly articulated feminism—expressed through the allyship of a mostly male creative team who were guided in part by their ferociously passionate female lead—is combined with a clairvoyant pre-Civil Rights era anti-racism, right there beside the labor issues of its central plot mechanism.

Or rather, according to Wilson’s precisely written script, race, class, gender, and work conditions are all tied in together by a process they didn’t have a label for in 1954 but which we might call “intersectionality” today. Because when a strike comes to the impoverished, mostly Mexican-descendant miners of Zinc Town, New Mexico, it isn’t run by plaster saints out of a Brechtian Group Theater Lehrstücke lesson play. Ramon, the strike leader (Juan Chacon, an actual labor leader), is somewhat heroic—and he’s stubborn as hell, which is an asset in a burgeoning labor boss. But at home Ramon is a tyrant, whose unthinking sexism stifles and thwarts his wife Esperanza at every turn.

Harassed, deported, yet still brilliant

Esperanza is played by the legendary Mexican actress/activist Rosaura Revueletas. Salt Of The Earth was Revueletas’ only U.S.-made movie, and she got deported before photography was completed. Before that, she endured harassment from U.S. Immigration and worked on a set that was occasionally shot up by “anti-communist” vigilantes in the dead of night. Revueletas is indelible anyway, giving one of those iconic female performances—think Maria Falconetti in 1928’s The Passion Of Joan Of Arc or Louise Brooks in 1929’s Pandora’s Box—that depends almost completely on emotions flickering across a grief-stricken face. Her Esperanza is a blazing example of quiet fire, a mobile pieta, imbued with a haunted solitude, even though within the busy tapestry of the strike action, Esperanza is almost never alone.

Funded by a mining union that had been tossed out of the CIO union federation for being too militant, Salt Of The Earth was spearheaded by director Biberman, who lost his studio career in the most high profile manner possible, as one of the creatives pilloried via an act of Congress for being part of the original Hollywood Ten. One of the miracles of Salt Of The Earth is that previously—and subsequently—Biberman had been a journeyman filmmaker at best, whose most representative film credit is probably Meet Nero Wolfe, a 1936 program picture that launched a low-performing franchise about a gentleman detective which lasted for precisely two movies.

A journeyman director’s timeless pro-labor statement

But Biberman was fresh from jail when he made “Salt of the Earth”—his six month stint in federal prison was a regulation sentence handed out to the Ten for their alleged mind-crimes. Biberman’s sensitivity to themes of oppression is palpable, and it was his decision to cast Latinx actors in all the Spanish-speaking parts, after nearly making the movie-killing choice to cast his blacklisted wife Gale Sondergaard in what became Revueletas’ part.

When the strike arrives, after another in a series of life-threatening incidents in the bowels of the company shafts, the searing image of the miner’s ostracized wives overlooking the stoppage from a distant hillside shows the power these women hold, even in latency. A stunning cross cut between Ramon as he’s beaten by strike-breaking cops and Esperanza bearing their child gives new expression to the term “labor struggles” (okay, okay, it’s actually poetical and powerful, but the pun could not be resisted).

Salt Of The Earth is also a milestone of indie cinema—an early example of a group of disaffected Hollywood types getting together and making the kind of movie they wanted to make, as an express act of protest against the content controls exercised by the pashas and production chiefs of the factory model. They didn’t have iPhones, free production-class editing software or AI assisting chatbots to help them, either. So striking writers take note: seize control of the means of production, and your movie could—how sweet the irony—end up in the Library of Congress’ National Registry of culturally significant works too, where Salt Of The Earth abides. And maybe we’ll also still be talking about what you did in a time of work stoppage in another 70 or so years.