I Lost It at the Movies

by Pauline Kael

  Here is the opening of the film and our introduction to the heroine, Esperanza: “A woman at work chopping wood. Though her back is to the camera, we sense her weariness in toil by the set of her shoulders . . . we begin to gather that she is large with child. The woman carries the load of wood to an outdoor fire, staggering under its weight. . . .” It doesn’t take us long to find out that this is eternal downtrodden woman, but if we’re slow, her first words set us straight: “How shall I begin my story that has no beginning? How shall I start the telling of all that is yet becoming?”

  The miners of Salt of the Earth are striking for equality (principally equality of safety conditions) with the “Anglos,” but the strike is not a bargaining weapon for definite limited objectives. It is inflated with lessons, suggestions and implications until it acquires symbolic status. This is the dialogue as the hero Ramon watches Esperanza, his wife, nursing the baby:

  Ramon: A fighter, huh?

  Esperanza: He was born fighting. And born hungry.

  Ramon: Drink, drink, Juanito. You’ll never have it so good.

  Esperanza: He’ll have it good. Some day.

  Ramon (half-whispering): Not just Juanito. You’ll have it good too, Esperanza. We’re going to win this strike.

  Esperanza: What makes you so sure?

  Ramon (brooding): Because if we lose, we lose more than a strike. We lose the union. And the men know this. And if we win, we win more than a few demands. We win . . . (groping for words) something bigger. Hope. Hope for our kids. Juanito can’t grow strong on milk alone.

  This is a strike in which the workers grow. “Have you learned nothing from this strike?” Esperanza asks her husband, and speaks of her own development: “I want to rise. And push everything up with me as I go. . . .” “Strike” in Salt of the Earth is used in its revolutionary meaning, as a training ground in solidarity, a preparation for the big strike to come — a microcosm of the coming revolution.

  If the author had cut up a pamphlet and passed out the parts, he wouldn’t have given out anything very different from this:

  Esperanza: They tried to turn people against us. They printed lies about us in their newspapers. . . . They said . . . that all the Mexicans ought to be sent back where they came from. But the men said . . .

  Antonio (slapping newspaper): How can I go back where I came from. The shack I was born in is buried under company property.

  Kalinsky: Why don’t nobody ever tell the bosses to go back where they came from?

  ’Cente: Wouldn’t be no bosses in the state of New Mexico if they did.

  Alfredo (dreamily): Brother! Live to see the day!

  Antonio: Talk about wide open spaces! Far as the eye can see —no Anglos.

  Ramon holds up a finger, correcting him.

  Ramon: No Anglo bosses.

  This pedagogical tone, so reminiscent of the thirties, is maintained throughout much of the film. Social realism has never been able to pass up an opportunity for instruction: these strikers are always teaching each other little constructive lessons. Here is Ramon reprimanding Frank, the “Anglo” union organizer, for his failure to recognize a picture of Juarez:

  Ramon: . . . If I didn’t know a picture of George Washington, you’d say I was an awful dumb Mexican.

  Frank (deeply chagrined): I’m an awful dumb Anglo . . . I’ve got a lot to learn.

  Then, of course, there are the big lessons: when Esperanza is in labor and the Sheriff is asked to get the doctor he responds with, “You kiddin’? Company doctor won’t come to no picket line.” A miner’s widow then speaks to the men picketing: “They, up there, your bosses — they don’t care whether your children live or die. Let them be born like animals! (A pause.) Remember this while you’re marching, you men. Remember well.” (She spits in the road.)

  Another facet of social realism is the inflation of dialogue to the rank of folk wisdom (Ramon: “ ‘No money down. Easy term payments.’ I tell you something: this installment plan, it’s the curse of the working class.”) and folk wit (Esperanza: “Finding scabs in Zinc town, Ramon said, was like looking for a rich man in heaven . . .”). These “oppressed” are not confused by book-learning and bosses’ lies. They are the custodians of the real social truth.

  The story is not just slanted: the slant is the story. Even the baby’s christening party — in the nighttime — is interrupted by deputy sheriffs with a repossession order for the radio. When the company gets an eviction order, we see the deputies “dumping the precious accumulations of a lifetime on to the road: the shrine, a kewpie doll, a faded photograph.” And, of course, the photograph of Juarez is “smashed in the dust.” If you have half an eye for this sort of thing, you’ll know when you first see Esperanza’s shiny radio that it will be taken away from her, just as you’ll know when you see the photograph of Juarez that it wouldn’t be framed except to be smashed.

  Detail upon detail adds up to a picture of fascism. How can responsible critics fail to see what they’re getting? Well, something has been added to this old popular front morality play, something that seems to give it new credibility.

  The superintendent of the mine (from his Cadillac) suggests to the sheriff that it would be nice to cut Ramon “down to size.” The sheriff “touches his Stetson courteously” and, a few moments later, gives the signal to four deputies — Vance, Kimbrough and two others. They arrest Ramon (who offers no resistance), handcuff him and thrust him into their car. Vance, “a pale, cavernous, slackjawed man,” is “slowly drawing on a pigskin glove.” After an exchange of a few words, the “gloved hand comes up, swipes Ramon across his mouth,” as Vance says softly, “Now you know that ain’t no way to talk to a white man.”

  Ramon sits tense now, awaiting the next blow. A trickle of blood runs down his chin. The two deputies in front sit like wax dummies, paying no attention to what is going on in back.

  Kimbrough: Hey, Vance. You said this Mex was full of pepper. He don’t look so peppery now.

  Vance: Oh, but he is. This bullfighter’s full of chile.

  He drives a gloved fist into Ramon’s belly. Ramon gasps, his eyes bulge. . . . Vance strikes him in the abdomen again. Kimbrough snickers. . . . Ramon is doubled up, his head between his legs. Vance pulls him erect.

  Vance: Hold your head up, Pancho. That ain’t no way to sit.

  Ramon (a mutter in Spanish): I’ll outlive you all, you lice.

  Vance (softly): How’s that? What’s that Spic talk?

  He strikes Ramon in the belly. Ramon gives a choked cry. Kimbrough holds up Ramon’s head while Vance punches him methodically. Ramon gasps in Spanish:

  Ramon: Mother of God . . . have mercy. . . .

  As if this were not enough, the next shots of Ramon being struck in the belly are intercut with Esperanza’s contractions as she gives birth. Finally, “the two images merge, and undulate, and blur . . . we hear the feeble wail of a newborn infant.”

  This full dress racial treatment is the politically significant ingredient in Salt of the Earth. Although socially, economically and legally the United States has been expiating its sins against minorities in record time, it is still vulnerable. The Communists exploit this vulnerability: the message for export is that America is a fascist country which brutally oppresses the darker peoples.

  Frank, Salt’s union organizer, tells us that “equality’s the one thing the bosses can’t afford.” The explanation offered is pitifully inadequate: “The biggest club they have over the Anglo locals is, ‘well — at least you get more than the Mexicans.’ ” Ramon replies, “Okay, so discrimination hurts the Anglo too, but it hurts me more. And I’ve had enough of it.” This catechism of Communist economics has a creaky sound. A rational Ramon in a film set in 1951 might very well ask: Why can’t this company afford equality when so many others can?

  To ask that would expose the mystification central to Salt of the Earth by indicating that this community is no microcosm of our society, and that the situation depicted is grotesquely far from typical. T
he film’s strike has not been placed against the background of American life which would provide perspective and contrast. It stays within a carefully composed system of references. (Esperanza describes the help the striking miners got — “messages of solidarity and the crumpled dollar bills of working men.” After fifteen years of wanting to know who the company president is, the miners come across a picture of him in a “Man of Distinction” ad. One of the men in the union truck that delivers food to the starving miners is a Negro; when a miner comes over, “the Negro leans down and shakes his hand warmly.”)

  Let’s take a look at the film’s claims to truth and “honesty.” The union president (who played Ramon) has written that a Production Committee had “the responsibility of seeing that our picture ran true to life from start to finish. Occasionally there were meetings in which the union people pointed out to our Hollywood friends that a scene we had just shot was not true in certain details. When that happened, we all pitched in to correct the mistake.” I think we may accept the evidence that those several hundred people who made the film believed that it was true; from this it does not follow, however, that we can assume that all the film’s incidents belong to the period of the 1951–1952 strike.

  Let’s take a further look at what the union president writes: “We don’t have separate pay rates any more. . . . Thank God for our union and for the men who organized it. Back in the ’thirties, they were blacklisted, thrown off company property and told to take their houses with them . . . Salt of the Earth was not intended to be a documentary record of that particular strike (1951–1952). But I will say this. It is a true account of our people’s lives and struggles.” So perhaps the eviction in the film does not derive from the 1951–1952 strike; perhaps the miners in 1951–1952 were not striking for equal safety conditions at all. And it would still be a “true,” honest movie to those who made it. If they accept this film as “fundamentally” true of their lives, a “symbolic” truth that is higher, more true than the plain details of that strike, then, probably, they can also take the next step, and believe that their struggle is typical and symbolic of American society (the sheriff who takes orders and bribes from the bosses symbolizes government as capitalism’s hired man; the company officers represent the decadent quality of American business; the love story of Ramon and Esperanza symbolizes the vitality of the masses, etc.).

  Can the people who had a “constructive” hand in the script believe in the abstract, symbolic characters as representations of their lives? Don’t the miners’ wives see that something is wrong somewhere when the famous Mexican actress who plays Esperanza, the symbol of their lives, is so unlike them? The miners’ wives — big women in slacks and jackets, with short permanented hair, and a pleasant, rather coarse plainness — suggest the active, liberated manner of free American women. Esperanza, fine-boned, gentle and passive, her long hair pulled back, dressed in drab, long skirts, is the Madonna on the picket line. Can the women accept nobility incarnate as the image of themselves? Or is it that they have gotten so far into symbolic thinking that they believe in this heroine not merely as their representative but as the symbol of all suffering humanity (“Esperanza” means “hope”) — so that she doesn’t really have to be at all like them, since she represents a higher truth about them? I think we must allow for the possibility that those who see themselves as symbols are capable also of holding rather symbolic notions of truth.

  Just for fun, let’s try out Salt’s realistic method. We decide that a true account of Negro life in a Northern city begs to be done. We take the simple story of a Negro girl led into a life of vice and crime by a white business man who seduces her and then casts her off on his corrupt cronies. We follow her to the brothel where she is forced to work (our brothel scenes are the first authentic record of a brothel to be included in a work of art). We take incidents from actual newspaper stories (the police own the brothel; city big-shots cover-up for the police). Real prostitutes not only play themselves, they supply us with information that makes it possible for us to give accurate representations of the impotent and perverted white businessmen who are their clients. The girls are rather a buxom crew, but our heroine (we were fortunate indeed to secure the services of Miss Greer Garson, who had dreamed all her life of playing a noble Negro prostitute)* suggests endurance and infinite patience. The heroine’s only friends are among the other prostitutes — and, as there is a white girl among them, she learns that not all white people are customers: there are white workers, too. The brutal mechanization of the heroine’s existence is forcefully presented in a sequence intercutting from her room to the rooms of the other girls. When, finally, the girls realize that in solidarity there is strength, they force the white madam (a cold, shrewd, hard-eyed aristocrat) to grant them better percentages.

  Have we told any lies? There is nothing in it that hasn’t happened at some time. All we had to do was select the data carefully and build up the story so that no “extraneous” material showing other forms of Negro life entered in. And it would be simple enough to inflate the dialogue so that the brothel becomes a microcosm of America, a symbol of race relations under fascism. Perhaps the best way to expose the falsification is to point out the brothel down the street — with white workers and a Negro clientele, and hence to suggest that perhaps America is too vast and pluralistic an enterprise to be symbolized in any one brothel.

  If we want to know something about the treatment of minority peoples in the United States we don’t look at one community, we examine and compare data in various communities, cities, industries and institutions. We examine the extraordinary social phenomenon of pecking (in one town the Irish peck the Italians, in the next the Italians peck the Mexicans, in other towns the Mexicans peck the Negroes, and some cities are a regular chicken yard, with Armenians or Portuguese last in the line) and other forms of internecine warfare among minorities. We look at the life of the integrated as well as the unintegrated minorities; we don’t assume that the life of the Mexican-American zinc miner is more symbolic of the treatment of minorities than the life of the corner grocer whose name is Ramirez.

  Compare Salt of the Earth with the films — social films, too of artists whose work is informed with individual imagination. Buñuel, whose shocking Los Olvidados gives the lie to the concept that the oppressed are the salt of the earth. De Sica, whose joyful little masterpiece Miracle in Milan flouted the expectations of Americans who looked to Italian neo-realism for sombre, serious “truth.” Eisenstein, who selected and stacked his images for ideological purposes, but who did it, at least, on a grand scale. The enemy was flamboyantly gross and evil, the violence obsessively brutal. Barbaric splendor, excesses overflowed the bounds of the ideology — just as Griffith’s fairy tale riches could not be contained in the moralistic framework of Intolerance. These artists use the film as a feast for eye and mind.

  The proletarian morality play is a strict form: the heroes and villains illustrate a lesson. The hero is humanity, the struggling worker trying to reach consciousness of his historical role. He is vital, full of untapped strength; the brutal oppression to which he has been subjected has made him all the more human.* He is a man who can learn. The villains are the hero’s class enemies — they are representatives of a decadent ruling class and they must be taught a lesson. Though they control economic power, they are personally weak: they have lost the life-force. They are subhuman. The play is not so much a sermon as a guide to action. It serves as a demonstration of the potential strength of the working class — or, in this case, minority peoples. Salt of the Earth is full of violence; it avails itself of the excitations of melodrama, but the violence is symbolic.

  Communists have their own fear of infection: the member or sympathizer who explores other ideas may be deflected from orthodoxy; he may succumb to the attractions of “bourgeois” thought. Unless he stays within the bounds of the approved ideas, he jeopardizes his own dedication to the cause and he may infect the circle of his acquaintances.

 
; “Social realism” is supposed to derive its art from reality. The art is negligible and nothing could be further from reality than these abstractions performing symbolic actions in a depressing setting. The setting does refer to the real world, however, and Salt of the Earth can seem “true” to people who have been in the Imperial Valley or New Mexico or the southern states. They have seen shocking living conditions and they may feel the moral necessity to do something about them. Communist propaganda takes this desire and converts it into a sense of anxiety and distress by “demonstrating” that all of American power supports this shocking situation and thus uses this situation for a total condemnation of American life. The moral sensibility that has given vitality to American principles is manipulated by these propagandists into a denial that America stands for those principles, and into an insistence that the real principles of American life are revealed in the sore spot. The moral person feels helpless and alienated unless he accepts the path that is offered to him — identifying his moral interests with the revolutionary aims of the working class.

  It is symptomatic of the dangers in a commercialized culture that these people — the ones who made the film and the ones who believe it — can find nothing else in American life to which they can give allegiance. They are articulate, literate. They are, no doubt, sincere in their dedication to the cause of the downtrodden. A film like Salt of the Earth seems so ridiculously and patently false that it requires something like determination to consider that those who make it believe in it. They serve a higher truth — and, of course, they have a guiding thread for their beliefs, a lifeline which directs them through the maze of realities and symbols. Those who hold the other end of the line are very shrewd in jerking it — now this way, now that. But what artist with vision or imagination could keep his fist closed so tight?