Norma Rae

A young single mother and textile worker agrees to help unionize her mill despite the problems and dangers involved.

Norma Rae finds Sally Field cast in the title role, a minimum-wage worker in a cotton mill. The factory has taken too much of a toll on the health of Norma Rae's family for her to ignore her Dickensian working conditions. After hearing a speech by New York union organizer Reuben (Ron Leibman), Norma Rae decides to join the effort to unionize her shop. This causes dissension at home when Norma Rae's husband Sonny (Beau Bridges) assumes that her activism is a result of a romance between herself and Reuben. Despite the pressure brought to bear by Management, Norma Rae successfully orchestrates a shutdown of the mill, resulting in victory for the union and capitulation to its demands. Based on a true story, Norma Rae is the film for which Sally Field won her first Oscar; an additional Oscar went to the film's main song, It Goes Like It Goes. (AMG)

AMG Review: Before her Oscar-winning, breakthrough role as a union organizer in Norma Rae, Sally Field was famous for being television's The Flying Nun and for her subsequent lightweight comic work, particularly with Burt Reynolds in Smokey and the Bandit. Casting Field in the lead role of a poor, uneducated worker who organizes a Southern mill proved to be a stroke of genius. She wasn't known for portraying assertive, powerful characters, and so her transformation in the film from mousy and helpless to an icon of resistance symbolized for many audiences similar psychic and social journeys. Norma Rae became an authentic portrait of empowerment because its heroine (and the actress portraying her) seemed so ordinary to begin with.