![]() Himes writes, “It had taken him some time to realize the scope of the Negro worker’s attitude toward unionism. In Lonely Crusade, another Chester Himes novel, a Black organizer reflects upon the paradox of the Black worker. For him, it is better to be defeated than deluded. He is a pawn, but he submits to being one because of a visceral knowledge of racism. In his eyes, they are all compelled to work for white men, but that doesn’t mean they should work with them. ![]() The script wisely makes Heavy more of an obstacle than a villain. Then there are those like Heavy, who refuses to join the union and agitates against them. There are those like Frank, who sees a way forward in a multiracial workers’ movement. Throughout the film, people who love each other, hate each other, or have no strong feelings at all find themselves in disagreement over the best way to survive white supremacy. Frank and Heavy (Moses Gunn), who may be acting on his own initiative or for the bosses, are at odds over more than collective bargaining. The story is based on court transcripts found by the film’s executive producer, Elsa Rassbach, who was struck by the testimony of two Black workers on opposite sides of the union fight. He becomes a hero not because he is brave, though he is, but because he doesn’t know another way to be. Frank stays and joins up with the mostly white union men because he believes their cause is just. Thomas gets the message and enlists to fight in Europe. It turns out to be good practice for this moment, which finds him, rag in hand, sopping up and wringing out the blood from a wounded face. Frank’s first job at the plant is mopping up floors to keep them from getting slick with the butchery’s fluids. When Thomas (Ernest Rayford), Frank’s best friend, is beaten in the slaughterhouse, the film cuts to a cow, then to the two men walking out, followed by a bowl of water gone ochre with blood. After Broadway but before his run with the Austrian Oak, he managed to craft The Killing Floor.Īlthough it was Duke’s feature-length directorial debut, it is propelled by strikingly beautiful and precise images, interspersed with archival footage functioning like newsreels from the wider world. He acted in the premiere run of Melvin Van Peebles’s Broadway show Ain’t Supposed to Die a Natural Death, worked with the Negro Ensemble Company, appeared alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger in Predator and Commando, and helmed an adaptation of Chester Himes’s novel A Rage in Harlem that premiered at Cannes. Film Festival (later renamed Sundance) in 1984.ĭuke has had the kind of career that could be called trailblazing if its path didn’t seem impossible to follow. It originally aired on public television before screening at the U.S. Under Bill Duke’s direction, the movie is no romance, but it is a kind of love film, equally at ease with rousing speeches as with a man pulling a blanket up over a sleeping friend. With many white workers abroad during World War I, Frank Custer (Damien Leake) heads north for better prospects only to confront a labyrinth of middlemen, cruel bosses, and white supremacy. ![]() It is on one level an archetypical Great Migration tale. It depicts the attempt to form an interracial union at a Chicago meatpacking plant in the years leading up to the race riots of 1919’s Red Summer. Those short hours are often skipped over in a story’s rising action, but they are the ones filled with the affinities that make the fight worth fighting. These kinds of films provide a worthy service by displaying the high cost that is glossed over in a slogan like “unions-the folks that brought you the weekend.” The struggle for a dignified workplace has always gone hand in hand with the struggle for free time. “Will we or won’t we have a union?” is a local question, but the answer ripples outward beyond the confines of any one shop. The struggle lends itself easily to a sweeping narrative. Union films are war films by other means. For good reason, the movies tend to revolve around the explosive point of contact between the competing classes. Then there are the feet pounding away on a picket line and the grimacing faces of strikebreakers. They are more often concerned with bodies subjected to torsion and the furrowed brow of someone who knows the cupboards are growing bare. Labor films are not where one typically goes when seeking love and grace.
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