Salt of the Earth

Herbert J. Biberman’s Salt of the Earth is a good, sometimes stiff political drama that takes working people seriously. It wants us to care about labour rights, racism and women’s rights, and does not pretend to be neutral about any of them. We need not demand neutrality from it. We can, however, ask that its characters have enough room to be people, and the film is uneven on that score.

Rosaura Revueltas, as Esperanza Quintero, gives it that room. We were moved by her restraint, by the impression of anger held back because expressing it has a cost. She makes the demand for respect feel personal, without making it small. Juan Chacón’s Ramon Quintero is less flexible, and the difference between the two performances can make the acting feel uneven. Her patient attention keeps drawing us back to the person behind the political point.

Michael Wilson’s writing is strongest in giving women’s rights a place alongside the concerns of organised labour. That choice prevents the film from treating working people as though they all want precisely the same things. There is something properly uncomfortable about a demand for equality that also has to be taken seriously within one’s own community. The script is less persuasive when it spells out what its sympathies have already made clear. Some of the speeches leave the actors little to discover.

The cinematography by Leonard Stark and Stanley Meredith helps keep this directness from becoming merely dutiful. Its starkness makes the people worth attending to without flattering them, and the lack of visual fuss suits the subject. There is pleasure in a film that does not seem embarrassed by ordinary faces. But plain presentation cannot solve every problem in the writing: when a passage becomes instructional, an unadorned image does not make it less so.

The editing by Ed Spiegel and Joan Laird sometimes lets that emphasis become heavy. A point can feel settled before the film is ready to move on, and those extra beats interrupt the momentum. That matters when a drama needs collective action to feel alive. The stiffness is intermittent, but noticeable beside the lead performance’s quiet assurance. At 94 minutes, this is hardly a test of endurance, although shortness alone does not make every passage brisk.

Sol Kaplan’s score adds earnestness where the film scarcely needs more of it. The music’s insistence can narrow our response, telling us how seriously to take material that has already earned serious attention. Will Geer, playing the Sheriff, gives authority a recognisable human face. His presence helps, although the writing leaves little uncertainty about how we should regard that authority, and the performance has limited room to complicate our response.

Within political drama, its sustained attention to women’s rights is a substantial virtue. The bluntness is a limitation, especially when the writing begins to sound settled on everyone’s behalf, but it does not cancel the conviction or the feeling. There is enough here to reward an interest in how films represent working people, without needing to excuse every rough passage as evidence of sincerity. Go for the people, and allow for the speeches.