AMERICAN RADIUM MOVIE MOVIE
This only adds to the impression that “Radium Girls” is designed less as a movie and more as an improvingly educational experience that outlines a shameful incident in U.S. And at worst, as with Etta (Susan Heyward), a Black photographer friend of Walt’s, the supporting cast can feel tokenistically summoned into being solely to tick off another box on an extremely long laundry list of socio-political hot topics. Which is all correct of course but jeez, give a gal a break. The death of Rudolph Valentino, the construction of Mount Rushmore, the Tulsa Race Massacre of 1921, the executions of wrongly convicted anarchists Nikola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, the 1922 excavation of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, the Red Scare, the emergence of the labor movement, women’s suffrage and more, all get a hurried nod.Īnd so the many side characters come off mostly as mouthpieces for these prevailing, conflicting ideologies, as with poor Commie nonentity Walt - the kind of earnest young ideologue who responds to his date’s chit-chat about Mount Rushmore with a glum account of how it’s being built on sacred Native lands, and to her mention of the pyramids with a reminder that they were built with slave labor.
AMERICAN RADIUM MOVIE TV
The issues, quite literally, do not stop there: As though there were not enough for several films (or again, several hours of a TV miniseries, the format that might actually suit this narrative best) in the radium court case story, Pilcher and Mohler seem anxious to cram in a glancing reference to almost every historical event occurring in and around that time.
AMERICAN RADIUM MOVIE ARCHIVE
The liberal use of archive footage throughout compounds that small-screen docudrama feeling, with the scripted theatrics in between taking on the feel of dramatic reconstruction rather than actual drama. But despite the best efforts of the cast, particularly King and Quinn and a terrific Colby Minifie playing a grievously ill yet still spunky dial painter who joins the crusade, the stultifyingly literal script, co-written by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, unfolds to such a familiar rhythm that it becomes hard to invest in “Radium Girls” as anything more than an educational made-for-TV special. The story is enraging, and should hit home hard today for its combination of corporate malfeasance, high-level corruption and bribery, and the absolutely subhuman treatment of these young women as expendable worker bees to be summarily silenced when they outlast their usefulness to the suffocatingly male establishment. Their fears are confirmed when the exhumation of Mary’s body reveals massive levels of radioactivity in her remains and when Jo, who has started to lose teeth as her jaw turns necrotic, is given just two years to live. It’s duly provided by the doctor Bessie finds through her new photographer boyfriend Walt’s (Collin Kelly-Sordelet) Communist Party connections to local labor league leader Wiley (Cara Seymour).
But Jo is a virgin and knows she cannot be syphilitic, so Bessie, transforming seemingly overnight from callow wannabe actress with stars in her eyes to impassioned social activist with fire in her belly, insists on a second opinion.
The company provides her with a clearly duplicitous doctor, who diagnoses her with syphilis, a conveniently taboo disease of which their dial-painter sister Mary also allegedly died.
0 kommentar(er)
