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Two feature films from the late 1940s and early 1950s that deserve to be better known will screen on Thursday as part of the White River Indie Festival in White River Junction.
That both Salt of the Earth and Border Incident happen to deal with immigration and labor issues speaks to the ongoing argument in this country over the role of unions, border controls and policing.
Salt of the Earth, a 1954 film based on a real-life, long-running strike at a zinc mine in New Mexico, was directed, written and scored by Herbert Biberman, Paul Jarrico and Michael Wilson, all of them casualties of the post-war Hollywood blacklist, which barred any film professional suspected of having Communist sympathies from working in the industry. It will screen at 3:30 p.m. in the Barrette Center for the Arts.
“It’s the only film in its entirety that was blacklisted,” said Rick Winston, a film historian and founder of the Green Mountain Film Festival in Montpelier, who will lead a post-screening discussion of Salt of the Earth.
The film was shot in New Mexico and uses both professional and amateur actors, including women and men who had participated in the strike by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers, Winston said. (The union had been expelled in 1950 from the Congress of Industrial Organizations for its alleged Communist sympathies.)
Although the miners in the film are both Mexican-American and Anglo, the narrative centers on the Quintero family, who are barely scraping by. Esperanza Quintero, married to Ramon Quintero, is pregnant with her third child, and struggling to free herself from her husband’s dominance.
After the mining company demonstrates its indifference to both the safety and the wages of its employees, the workers engage in a heated debate and decide to strike.
What makes the film stand out is its prescient treatment of the women and their insistence on being heard as equals to the men, and its sympathetic portrayal of the Mexican-Americans struggling with racism.
“It’s a movie about a strike that takes the side of the workers, it’s a movie about race relations that takes the side of the Chicanos and it’s a movie about gender relations that takes the side of the women. It’s an amazing political statement coming out of Hollywood, if you want to call it that,” said Winston.
The movie was beset with problems, during and after filming.
The Mexican actress Rosaura Revueltas, who played Esperanza Quintero, was arrested by the FBI and deported two weeks before the end of shooting, on the claim of immigration fraud, Winston said. All the professional actors in the movie had been blacklisted, Winston said.
And after the film was completed, it could get only a very limited release in smaller theaters because the co-chairman of the American Federation of Labor Film Council, Roy Brewer, a virulent anti-Communist, had asked the government to investigate the film, according to The New York Times’ obituary of Brewer. And, Winston said, film processing labs and projectionists were under orders not to work on it. When it came out, it showed in only 12 theaters nationwide.
Salt of the Earth disappeared from the scene, and its reputation languished until the mid-1960s and 1970s when society, in a sense, caught up to the issues that the film had raised and it began to be shown at festivals and conferences, Winston said.
It’s a timely film, he added. “These are issues that people are thinking about.”
Also screening on Thursday, at 6:30 p.m., is the woefully undersung 1949 film Border Incident, directed by Anthony Mann and starring Ricardo Montalban and George Murphy as federal agents — the former Mexican, the latter American — who team up to combat the smuggling of immigrant workers over the California border.
It’s notable on a number of counts: a story about the trafficking of human labor, the casting of a Latino actor, Montalban, as a heroic lead, and the direction by Mann, whose films examine the strains of violence in American history. Last but certainly not least, Border Incident boasts the remarkable cinematography, in rich shades of gray and silver, of John Alton, who shot a number of film noir movies.
“It’s interesting how it draws on different genres: the police genre and elements of the Western,” said Gerd Gemunden, a professor of both German studies and film and media studies at Dartmouth College who will lead the post-screening discussion.
Gemunden, who has taught a course on film noir, stumbled across Border Incident some time ago, watched it and found it, he said, “really intriguing.” And the cinematography, he added, is “stunning.”
Salt of the Earth will be shown on Thursday at 3:30 p.m.; Border Incident will be shown the same day at 6:30 p.m. Both films will be screened at the Barrette Center for the Arts in White River Junction. For tickets ($10 per adult; $5 per student) and information go to wrif.org. Tickets may also be bought during the festival at the theater box office. See wrif.org for box office schedule.
Nicola Smith can be reached at nsmith@vnews.com.