This is the first film that earned Sally Field an Oscar--in the title role. "Norma Rae" is a slightly fictionalized retelling of a real-life series of events (among other things, the names have been changed). It's set in a textile town in North Carolina. When a union organizer comes to town, the workers are very leery about talking with him or joining the union. However, eventually Norma Rae and a few others join. However, they face intimidation, job loss and perhaps worse if they join--even though this is a violation of the law. It seems in this town, what the mill owners want, the mill owners get. Can Norma Rae survive and win against a huge machine bent on crushing the union?

This is a very compelling story--especially since these places were terrible places to work--with low wages, brown lung (a fatal disease caused by inhaling cotton fibers) and bosses who have a 'take it or leave it' attitude about the employees. Ironically, in real life, after the mill workers eventually unionized, slowly the mills began to close and jobs were sent abroad. Today you'd barely know that North Carolina was once a huge textile producing state.

Overall, a very good film with a nice performance by Field and was her breakout movie role. I liked how the leading character was, at the beginning, a complete screw-up in life. But, as the film progressed, she grew up and became so much more. The plot was compelling, interesting and, at times, exciting. Not a great film but a very, very good one--and well worth your time.

It's funny, but my wife seemed to have no interest in watching this film. Because her family comes from North Carolina and practically all of them worked in the mills decades ago she'd be interested...but she wasn't. Perhaps it's too depressing for her to think of her parents and grandparents working such a low paying and thankless job. Regardless, when she saw I was watching "Norma Rae", she left to find something else to do!

By the way, this movie repeats an often repeated line as the Sheriff tells Norma Rae (after she's arrested) "You got one phone call...". You CAN and do have more than one phone call--it's just a movie/TV myth that it's only one.

Before writing this review I noted that Norma Rae was shot entirely in the state of Alabama, a state known for its anti-union tradition. Was this director Martin Ritt having a private joke shooting it there and did the Alabama film commission know exactly what Ritt was making?

The attitudes of the management of the textile mill are pretty typical of Alabama. They want no union no how and no Jewish organizer from New York played by Ron Leibman here is going to change things. Leibman knows he's going to meet cultural resistance so he's got to get a point person among the workers to carry the ball.

The person Leibman chooses is Norma Rae played by Sally Field in what turned out to be her first Best Actress Award winning performance. Field is at first glance about as typical as you can get for a textile mill worker. But Field slowly but surely brings out the fact that Norma Rae is a woman who is curious about the world and knows intuitively there's something better out there. The way to get it for herself and her co-workers is to have that union and have some strength in dealing with management.

Sally Field's career ever since she left television and Gidget and The Flying Nun had her playing mostly women of a southern rural background, she seems to have taken a patent out on those parts. Right from films like The Way West through the films she did with Burt Reynolds, it seems almost like she was preparing for the parts that got her the Academy Award. I don't think it's a coincidence that her second Oscar for one of the most beautiful films of the Eighties, Places In The Heart is also for a southern woman in a rural setting.

Field also gets good support from Beau Bridges whom she finds time to romance and wed while doing all her union organizing and from Pat Hingle playing her father.

Besides Field's Oscar for Best Actress, Norma Rae won a second Oscar for Best Song for It Goes Like It Goes which is sung at the opening and closing credits by Jennifer Warnes.

Thirty years after Norma Rae was released, I'm almost afraid to say it, but that mill town has probably lost the textile mill to China or to the third world. Hopefully some Norma Raes will emerge in those populations as well.

It's the summer of 1978. Norma Rae (Sally Field) works in a textile mill with her whole family. Her mother is going deaf from the noisy factory. Her father Vernon (Pat Hingle) threatens union organizer Reuben Warshowsky (Ron Leibman) who comes knocking on their door. She's a single mom and she ends her affair with a married man. She marries fellow worker Sonny (Beau Bridges). She starts helping Reuben causing tension in her relationships.

Sally Field is brilliant as an ordinary woman. She is eminently likable. The movie is a straight forward union story. It has a good sense of realism. It helps to have the noisy mill going. It's a great movie.