Salt of the Earth
Herbert Biberman
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Plot Summary
Special edition of the famous 1954 blacklisted film about the 1950 strike by zinc miners in Silver City, New Mexico, Salt of the Earth explores the complex issues of labor relations, minority rights and the struggle of women to achieve equality in their daily lives.
Credits
Director
Screenwriter
Rotten Tomatoes Movie Reviews
TOMATOMETER
100%- Reviews Counted: 11
- Fresh: 11
- Rotten: 0
- Average Rating: 7.6/10
Top Critics' Reviews
Fresh: The hard-focus, realistic quality of the picture's photography and style completes its characterization as a calculated social document.
Fresh: Salt of the Earth is a good, highly dramatic and emotion-charged piece of work that tells its story straight. It is, however, a propaganda picture which belongs in union halls rather than theatres.
Fresh: This is pretty amazing.
Fresh: An extraordinary film, made under extraordinary conditions and based on real events.
Customer Reviews
Salt of the Earth
This is a great movie filmed by victims of the blacklist under conditions of great duress. ( see the book "Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist" by Patrick McGilligan & Paul Buhle) Filmed largely in Mexico with Mexican actors, may be considered boring for american audiences, mores the pity. expand your horizons and watch it.
Artful propaganda
For those interested in liberal causes, this movie has it all: labor union advocacy, women's rights advocacy, identity politics & even communist intrigue. This is enough to earn it a Rotten Tomatoes rating of 100% but for me it is just another advocacy film without a hint of an interest in telling the story in a balanced manner. In presnet day terms, this movie is what would happen if Keith Olbermann and Oliver Stone made a movie together.
I find the Variety Staff review especially interesting: "tells its story straight...a propaganda picture." Which is it Variety: truthful story telling or propaganda? I read their review to mean, "This is really great propaganda and we agree with its point of view."
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