Salt & Pepper

Salt of the Earth was asking for trouble. Written, produced and directed by three of Hollywood's blacklisted fellow travelers--Michael Wilson, Paul Jarrico and Herbert Biberman--the picture was sponsored by the International Union of Mine, Mill and Smelter Workers (expelled from the C.I.O. in 1950 for being Communist-dominated ).

When production started near Silver City, N. Mex. (pop. 7,000), the townspeople rioted and warned the moviemakers to get out of town before they were shipped out "in black boxes" (TIME, March 16, 1953). Under police protection, Jarrico & Co. kept shooting until the leading lady, Mexican Actress Rosaura Revueltas, was deported as an illegal alien.

Salt of the Earth had its world premiere last week in a tiny third-run-and-revival house in Manhattan's Yorkville district. The critics had a variety of reactions. The Herald Tribune's Otis Guernsey denounced Salt as "a game played with loaded dice ... at the expense of the whole truth." The Times's Bosley Crowther called it simply "a strong pro-labor film." A more inspired appraisal came from the Daily Worker's Joseph North: "This movie stands with the best ever made, here or anywhere across the waters ..."

Salt of the Earth tells the story of a strike of Mexican-American zinc miners in New Mexico. The miners want the same pay as the "Anglos" who do the same jobs at other pitheads; and their wives want plumbing for the huts they live in on company property. The company refuses to negotiate, wins an injunction forbidding the miners to picket. They stop--and the women start. At this unexpected development, the police don't know quite what to do. First they try pushing. Then they use tear gas. The women cannot be moved.

Almost a year passes in bitter deadlock. Other unions send food and money to keep the strikers going. The men do the women's work while the women stand duty--or the work goes undone. In the story of Ramon Quintero (Juan Chacon) and his wife Esperanza (Rosaura Revueltas), the moral of the strike is lived out in sweat and painful growing.

All the issues, private and public, find reconciliation in the climax as the com pany gives up and the workers win. The dice, without doubt, are loaded. Every boss who crosses the screen is either a sleek deceiver or a leering flunky, and the police are slavish doers of the corporate will. Nevertheless, the film, within the propagandistic limits it sets, is a work of vigorous art. It is crowded with grindingly effective scenes, through which the passion of social anger hisses in a hot wind; and truth and lies are driven before it like sand.

The passion carries the actors along too in its gale. The workers, actual miners of the New Mexico local, carry conviction in their savage setting as trained actors could never do. The best of the worker-players is Juan Chacon, real-life president of the union local. Ugly and cold as an Aztec amulet, his heavy face comes slowly to life and warmth as the picture advances, and in the end seems almost radiant.

Three days after Salt of the Earth's premiere, the tradesheet Variety posed an interesting problem: Will Salt, if shown in theaters overseas, give the Communists ready-ground propaganda with which to pepper the U.S.? Since Jarrico & Co. are independent of the powerful Motion Picture Association, they are free to show the film wherever bookings can be had (i.e., with non-M.P.A. foreign distributors). First scheduled foreign showing of Salt of the Earth: in Mexico City, this month.

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