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The Suppression of Salt of the Earth: How Hollywood, Big Labor, and Politicians Blacklisted a Movie in Cold War America
JAMES J. LORENCE, 1999
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press
pp. xv + 279, $45.00 (cloth); $19.95 (paper)
In director John Sayles' Return of the Seacaucus Seven (1980), a cadre of aging baby boomers recalls their halcyon days of political activism during the turbulent 1960s. Once, when put behind bars in the titular New Jersey city, they had playfully chanted "We want the formula! We want the formula!" to the bewildered jailers. A wry homage by the New Left to the Old Left, the reference was to a cathartic moment in Salt of the Earth (1954), when a stalwart band of imprisoned Chicana housewives demand milk for an infant.
In an informative volume that yokes labor history and film studies, historian James J. Lorence tells the fascinating story of what is perhaps the single most anomalous cinematic legacy of Cold War America. As an index of class, race, and gender, the holy trinity of current academic fashion, Salt of the Earth makes an irresistible subject for an extensive case history. Its astronomical political correctness quotient aside, however, it is also that rare film that takes on a significance beyond itself, not just as a cause celebre frozen in time but as a rich vein from which to mine the nuggets of Cold War culture. That such a film got made in the America of 1954 seems astonishing; that it is a worthy film, so prescient in its documentary aesthetic, multicultural sympathies, and feminist consciousness, is nothing short of miraculous. To Lorence, it endures as "a celluloid document of the resistance to Cold War repression and a record of a people striving to make their own history" (61).
A labor of love and a love song to labor, Salt of the Earth was written by Michael Wilson, produced by Paul Jarrico, and directed by Herbert Biberman, one of the original Hollywood Ten. Rendered persona non grata in Hollywood by the 1947 HUAC hearings and the Waldorf Statement (in which the major studios pledged not to knowingly employ Communists), they teamed with other blacklisted filmmakers under the banner of the Independent Productions Corporation...