labor unions

The Devil and Miss Jones (1941)

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There is something grotesque about the way cultural institutions are preemptively leaning further right-wing in anticipation of the second Trump administration. Trump’s second term has not started yet, but companies like Disney & Meta are already self-censoring in anticipation of a hard-right shift towards moral censorship, which likely makes business sense given Trump’s public alignment with “anti-woke” shitposter Elon Musk. Usually, being designated The Richest Man in the World encourages billionaires to hide from the public in shame while executing their political influence in private, but Musk has instead elected to purchase himself a prominent role in Executive Branch politics, demanding to be liked in addition to being feared. He’s openly rigging the system to be more favorable to his regressive worldview, which is something the wealthy are supposed to do behind closed doors. There’s nothing new to the cultural strong-arming through obscene wealth that Trump & Musk are indulging in right now, except in the extent of their shamelessness to do so in full public view. If nothing else, you can already see their personality & tactics viciously satirized as far back as the 1940s comedy The Devil and Miss Jones, which itself preemptively apologizes & kowtows to “The Richest Men in the World” . . .  before mocking them mercilessly.

As early as its opening credits, The Devil and Miss Jones is clear about the moral stance it’s going to take in the eternal Class War. Charles Coburn is introduced as The Richest Man in the World by a title card that dresses him in a devil costume, with the flames of Hell roaring behind him. His comedic foil—Jean Arthur as a humble department store clerk—is then introduced dressed as a heavenly angel, complete with wings & halo. Then, a written letter from the producers apologize to The Richest Men in the World for that satirization, begging to not be sued for defamation since it’s not meant to target any one Wealthy Ghoul in particular (a tactical move that Orson Welles would have been wise to borrow for his satirization of William Randolph Hearst in Citizen Kane that same year). Part of the reason they can get away with the transgression is that the ultra wealthy of the time mostly had the good sense to hide from the public. Or, that’s at least Coburn’s approach as a millionaire businessman who’s so obscenely rich he’s no longer sure what actual businesses he owns. In the opening scene, he’s horrified to discover that an effigy of his likeness was hung & burned outside a department store by its unhappy workers, which made the front page of the daily papers. Only, those workers have no idea what he actually looks like; they just know (and curse) his name.

Coburn weaponizes his anonymity by posing as a regular worker at the department store, so that he can single out the dissidents on his payroll for mass firing. His attempts to unionbust from the inside quickly go awry when he discovers that the ground-level workers are wonderful people, and that middle-management are the true social pariahs. Jean Arthur is especially adorable as the titular Miss Jones, who adopts the Undercover Boss out of pity because he is absolutely abysmal as a salesman. Coburn is dragged to an underground union-organizing meeting after his very first day, so that he can be paraded as an example of how pathetic elderly workers can become in old age once they outlive their usefulness to their corporate employers. Without all of his wealth strong-arming his Yes Men into doing his bidding, Coburn proves to be a low-skill, low-intelligence loser, which is a characterization the movie doesn’t back down from even as his fellow department store workers help him stay on his feet so he can make a living. When his true identity as the company’s owner is revealed to those kind souls, he’s met with the same reaction that greets Monstro Elisasue at the end of The Substance; they recoil in horror at his monstrosity, disgusted with themselves from socializing with someone as grotesquely inhuman as the 1%.

Directed by Marx Brothers collaborator Sam Wood, The Devil and Miss Jones is a hilarious class-differences comedy about how labor unions are pure good, the wealthy are pure evil, and everyone loves a day at the beach. It may indulge in a little “We’re not so different after all” apologia in depicting its cross-class culture clash, but its politics remain sharply observed throughout. Even Miss Jones’s romantic infatuation with the department store’s most ardent labor-union rabble-rouser has its nuances, as the movie criticizes the unchecked machismo of Leftist men by having him blab pigheaded phrases like, “A woman’s place in the world is to tend to the male” while she scoffs. The main target of its political satire is, of course, Coburn’s obliviousness as a wealthy ghoul, repeatedly humbling his sense of superiority among the unwashed “idiots” and “morons” in his employ. It feels especially pointed that even when those workers attempt to sweeten the fine wine he brings along to their Coney Island beach day with a splash of Coca-Cola, it’s not quite enough to overpower the bitterness. Its class & labor commentary has aged incredibly well, so it’s somewhat a shame that its cultural reputation as mostly persisted as a footnote to the porn-parody title The Devil in Miss Jones, directed decades later by Gerard Damiano.

-Brandon Ledet

Pride (2014)

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Sometimes political action looks like putting a brick through a window or spitting in the face of abusive cops who could (gladly) do much worse to you in return. We’re currently living through such urgent times, where the public execution of George Floyd has incited mass #BlackLivesMatter protests around the globe, which have been needlessly escalated by police. This is coincidentally happening at the start of Pride month, when political protest annually takes the form of parades & parties, a celebration of communities whose mere existence is in opposition to oppressors who’d rather see them dead. Both of these grandly conspicuous forms of political action are valid – vital, even. That’s a point that’s worth remembering in a time when major media outlets & self-appointed pundits at home will actively attempt to discredit them for demonstrating in “the wrong way.”

The 2014 film Pride opens with depictions of similarly conspicuous political action: a mass of ruthless bobbies beating down a crowd of working-class joe-schmoes for daring to stand up for themselves during the 1980s U.K. miners’ strike, followed by a dramatic recreation of a 1980s London Pride march. To its credit, though, the film doesn’t fully glamorize political organization & protest as romantic, action-packed heroism for the majority of its runtime. It instead paints an honest picture of what the bulk of political action looks like on a daily, boots-on-the-ground basis: it’s tedious, thankless, and mostly uneventful. Pride is realistic about how unglamorous the daily mechanisms of year-round protest are. It focuses more on the distribution of pamphlets, the repetitive collection of small donations, and the under-the-breath verbal mockery from passersby that make up the majority of political organization, rather than extraordinary moments like now, where more drastic actions are necessary. And it manages to make these well-intentioned but mundane routines feel just as radical & punk-as-fuck as smashing in a cop car window. It proudly blares Pete Seger’s union organizing anthem “Solidarity Forever” in the background as a rousing call to arms for a life decorated with chump-change collection buckets & hand-out leaflets that are immediately tossed to the ground.

Where Pride is incredibly honest about how mundane most political organization is, it’s shamelessly artificial & schmaltzy about the messy lives & passions of the human beings behind those collective actions. This is a feel-good historical drama about gay & lesbian activists in 1980s London who stuck out their necks to show solidarity with striking coal miners in Wales, modeled after the real-life organizational efforts of the Gays and Lesbians Support the Miners alliance. It’s basically an improved revision of Kinky Boots that genuinely strives for authentic, meaningful political observations about the overlapping struggles of queer urban youths and the working-class townies who are socialized to bully them instead of recognizing them as comrades. The only hiccup is that it’s ultimately just as safe (and weirdly sexless) as feel-good queer stories like Kinky Boots that erase the personal quirks & humanistic faults of its gay characters to smooth them out into inspiring, inhuman archetypes. There is no sex, nor sweat, nor unhinged fury in this film – just politics. And it remarkably gets just by fine on those politics alone because it actually has something to say about class solidarity & grassroots political organization, especially in the face of stubborn institutions who’d rather die than acknowledge your comradery.

Part of what makes this vision of community organization in sexless, tedious action somehow riveting is the collective charms of its cast, which is brimming with recognizable Brits. Dominic West is the closest the film comes to allowing a character to fully run wild, as an elder statesman of his queer political circle who’s prone to partying himself into a mad state of debauchery. Bill Nighy is his polar opposite, playing a bookishly reserved small-towner who’s so shaken up by the political yoots who invade his union hall that he comes just short of stammering “Wh-wh-what’s all this gaiety then?” Andrew “Hot Priest” Scott carries the cross as the film’s Gay Misery cipher—suffering small-town PTSD in the return to his childhood stomping grounds in Wales—but he gives such an excellent performance in the role that it somehow lands with genuine emotional impact. A baby-faced George MacKay is deployed as the bland, fictional, fresh-out-of-the-closet protagonist who makes gay culture feel safe & unalienating to outsiders who might be turned off by someone less “accessible”, but he somehow manages to mostly stay out of the way. We check in to watch him gay-up his record collection with Human League LPs and experience his first (and the film’s only) same-gender makeout at a Bronski Beat concert, but he’s mostly relegated to the background. The film’s class solidarity politics are always allowed to stand front & center as the main attraction, and the cast is only there to be charming enough to make standing on the sidewalk with a small-donations bucket seem like a cool & worthwhile way to spend your youth, for the betterment of your comrades.

A lot of Pride‘s historical setting dissociates its political messaging from our current moment. George Floyd-inspired protests aside, gay pride marches meant something completely different at the height of 1980s AIDS-epidemic homophobia than they do now, and Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative tyranny has since become more of a political symbol than an active threat. The mundane day-to-day mechanics of community organization have largely remained the same over the decades, however, so the film chose a fairly sturdy basket to store all its eggs in. It’s difficult to make the daily routines of political organization seem sexy & cool, because the truth of it is so draining & unglamorous (until it’s time to throw a brick). Pride doesn’t bother with the sexy part, but it’s got plenty of energizing, inspiring cool to spare, which is at the very least a more useful achievement than what you’ll find in most feel-good gay dramas of its ilk.

-Brandon Ledet

The Irishman (2019)

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Despite it earning an ecstatic reception that wasn’t afforded to similar late-career, swing-for-the-fences experiments like Silence or Hugo, I struggled to get excited for Martin Scorsese’s latest picture. Somewhere between the film’s 3.5-hour runtime and my disappointment in seeing my ancient Unkie Marty fall back on his tried & true Gangster Epic template, I couldn’t help but meet the prospect of watching The Irishman with an exhausted shrug. I doubt I ever would have caught up with the film at all if it weren’t for its prominence in the current Oscars Discourse, as I’ve been outright bored by Scorsese’s most recent mobster-violence retreads The Departed & The Wolf of Wall Street in the past. Even as someone who’d count GoodFellas among his favorite films of all time, I struggle to see the need to return to this thematic territory yet again, especially from a filmmaker who has so many other kinds of stories to tell (and, sadly, so little time left to tell them). It turns out that I was both a little right and a little wrong in my skepticism. The Irishman finds plenty more to say about the corruption & violence of organized crime that Scorsese has not addressed in previous efforts. Unfortunately, it allows that new material to be drowned out by an overwhelming flood of the same-old-same-old.

Scorsese mascot Robert De Niro stars as a low-level mafia hitman who becomes the unlikely, trusted bodyguard of infamous union organizer Jimmy Hoffa – played by the explosively charismatic Al Pacino. Pacino remains a hoot throughout the picture, which almost forgives the endless hours that monotonously detail the behind-the-scenes corruption & violence on the union-mafia border. Classic Scorsese collaborators like Joe Pesci & Harvey Keitel are flanked by giddy-to-be-there “youngsters” like Ray Romano & Bobby Cannavale in a GooderFellers redux that serves mostly as a history lesson to a new generation about why Hoffa was important in his time and how his flagrant corruption forever altered public opinion on labor unions in America. Each cast member holds their own in this decades-spanning epic, despite a distracting, much-written-about “de-aging” effect that lands the film near the realm of the “theme park” superhero movies Scorsese has been having fun flippantly dismissing in the press. It’s just that they’re instructed to joylessly go through the motions of reliving Marty’s past Mean Streets/GoodFellas/Casino triumphs, deliberately stripping the onscreen power & violence of any potential misinterpreted cool. No matter how many times Scorsese’s past pictures have been willfully misinterpreted as dorm-poster posturing for Badass Antiheroes, they’ve always had that same grim, hyper-critical eye for this realm of hyperviolent bullies. Those movies were just never this dull or exhausting. Scorsese is essentially repenting here for the sin of being entertaining.

In theory, I appreciate the idea of Scorsese self-examining what a life spent submerged in all this violence is meant to accomplish. In its best moments, The Irishman is exactly that – featuring an ancient De Niro, retired from his Murderer for Hire days, unable to find meaning in the remaining scraps of his life. He self-justifies his “youthful” crimes as a soldier who was just following orders, one with a duty to “protect” his family by remaining well-employed. After three grueling hours of matter-of-fact violence & corruption, the movie finally finds him discovering just how empty all that dutiful brutality truly was. Faced with the idleness of obsoletion & an inability to mend familial bonds that were never really there to begin with (especially with a silently disgusted adult daughter played by an expertly icy Anna Paquin), he actually considers what he’s done with his life for the first time, and is haunted by what he finds. That’s the core of the movie! That’s new, fresh territory worth dwelling on & exploring at length in miserable sequences of domestic drama. Unfortunately, these scenes that get at what the movie is About are only a small blip in a grander picture, a flood of familiar faces & imagery from Scorsese’s past work. I could have fallen in love with The Irishman if it started with that final half-hour and really dug into the themes that distinguish it as a unique work in Scorsese’s catalog. As is, they’re treated more as dashes of seasoning rather than a proper meal.

Ultimately, The Irishman is Fine. It’s also easy to complain about and not entirely worth the effort, so in that sense I suppose it’s a perfect Oscar Movie. Part of me wishes that Scorsese had gotten all these accolades for something more demanding & daring like Silence instead, but I can’t begrudge one of our greatest living cinephiles getting recognized for his contributions to the artform – no matter the context. The only real hurdle here for most audiences is going to be its massive runtime, as everything else goes down relatively smooth (including the confounding “de-aging” tech, thanks to the growing ubiquity of CGI fuckery on the big screen). I’ve got my own personal reservations about the choice in subject matter & thematic emphasis, but no real fervor for shouting them at what appears to be an otherwise appreciative crowd.

-Brandon Ledet