Norma Rae

In Hollywood, where most directors fight to get their name above the title, Martin Ritt let the characters star. The filmmaker, who died last Saturday at the age of 76, was survived by his wife, Adele; his daughter, Martina Ritt Werner; his son, Michael, and some indelible characters named Hud, Norma Rae, and Stanley and Iris, not to mention a hound called Sounder. Martin Ritt was a sturdy, bullnecked guy who resembled the gruffest of bookies and spoke like the gentlest of scholars.

Irving Ravetch, 89, a two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter - for Hud and Norma Rae , written with his wife, Harriet Frank Jr. - died Sunday of pneumonia at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In a collaboration that began with the 1958 film The Long, Hot Summer, Mr. Ravetch and Frank wrote the scripts for more than a dozen films, including The Sound and the Fury, Hombre, The Reivers, Murphy's Romance, and Stanley & Iris. They shared Oscar nominations in 1964 for their screenplays for Hud, a drama set in modern Texas and starring Paul Newman, and in 1980 for Norma Rae , a drama starring Sally Field in her Oscar-winning role as an impassioned Southern union organizer.

OK, let's face it. Labor Day isn't exactly a watershed where holiday movies are concerned. So indulge us this labored proposition - labor films for Labor Day. You'll find no cartoons at your video store spreading animated myths about the founding of the American workers' movement. There are no musicals saluting the dignity of labor, unless you count laboring through the Jerry Lewis telethon as being work-related. Most of you won't care. You'll be out there picnicking and frolicking and basking in the last symbolic glow of summer.

Josey Aimes is the canary in the mine. For one thing, the gal with the dishwater mullet played by Charlize Theron in the stirring drama North Country is among the first female miners in a Minnesota iron works. For another, the single mom who needs the job to support her two kids isn't shy about complaining to her shop steward and to management that the men in the pits are sexually harassing her. When Josey files a grievance that she's had it up to here with their taunts, pornographic graffiti and groping, her steward and the company CEO all but say she's not man enough for the job. Set in the mid-1980s and loosely based on the lawsuit chronicled in Class Action: The Story of Lois Jensen and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, North Country is a movie in the inspirational spirit of Norma Rae. Unionizing a Southern textile factory where women work is hard enough.

Perky people always have something upbeat to say, a cheerful hello to issue, a compliment to drop. In times such as these, they are a beacon of light in a storm-tossed sea of bitterness, anger, darkness. So why do we hate them? It's a question that hovers over "Happy Go Lucky," an oddball British movie that makes a courageous attempt to profile a woman who lives up to the title, always, in every situation. Like Spongebob, only human. I say courageous because any sort of comprehensive movie biography carries the implication of, at the very least, mood change.

THIS WEEK, in honor of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast, I mounted my own personal Oscars Film Festival. With the help of Netflix, Jiffy Pop and the only non-flat TV screen left in captivity, I spent hours admiring the type of performances that lead people to say, "We like you, we really like you!" Ironically, I managed to pick films that provided eerie parallels with current events. It got to the point that I realized that Hollywood is just better- quality reality programming (better scripts, cleaner women, smarter men)

Over his 30-year collaboration with screenwriters Harriet Frank Jr. and Irving Ravetch, director Martin Ritt has quietly and affectionately examined the lives of American outsiders with names such as Hud, Norma Rae and Conrack. Though unglamorous by conventional standards, they are fine company, these coarse characters whose textured faces and behavior Ritt renders so remarkably. Add the exceptional Stanley & Iris to Ritt's portrait gallery, one that also includes Sounder, Pete 'n' Tillie and The Molly Maguires.

The hospital door swings open and in strides the diminutive M'Lynn Eatenton. Silhouetted against the light, she is hauntingly alone, yet her staccato steps fill the huge, empty corridor with a will and determination that telegraph an unquestioned strength beneath a smiling surface. It's a very small scene from Steel Magnolias, being released on video this week, but it speaks volumes about the character M'Lynn - and about the actress who plays her. It has taken 20 years, but Sally Field - little Gidget, the Flying Nun, who broke out of her California-cute shell to give some of the most heart- wrenching, difficult performances in American film - has proven that she is a steel hibiscus.

In her new comedy Soapdish, Sally Field plays an overdressed, overwrought, over-the-top, almost over-the-hill soap opera queen. She'll chew up the scenery - and anything else in her way. Celeste Talbert is America's Sweetheart, star of the country's most popular daytime drama, The Sun Also Sets, where the backstage intrigue is even more convoluted (and improbable) than the on-camera plot machinations. "Celeste is extremely neurotic, insecure, rather grabby," says Field. "She likes to pick on the little guy who can't fight back.

The VCR has given parents unprecedented power to guide their children's movie viewing. Just as parents pass along their favorite books in hopes that their children will share the joy they once experienced in those pages, VCR owners can share transcendent movie moments. In fact, watching films together as a family can make them all the more meaningful. But what movies are appropriate? Might the content of more mature movies be too advanced? How relevant are the movie's ratings? And won't old movies be boring for children?

THIS WEEK, in honor of the upcoming Academy Awards telecast, I mounted my own personal Oscars Film Festival. With the help of Netflix, Jiffy Pop and the only non-flat TV screen left in captivity, I spent hours admiring the type of performances that lead people to say, "We like you, we really like you!" Ironically, I managed to pick films that provided eerie parallels with current events. It got to the point that I realized that Hollywood is just better- quality reality programming (better scripts, cleaner women, smarter men)

Irving Ravetch, 89, a two-time Oscar-nominated screenwriter - for Hud and Norma Rae , written with his wife, Harriet Frank Jr. - died Sunday of pneumonia at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. In a collaboration that began with the 1958 film The Long, Hot Summer, Mr. Ravetch and Frank wrote the scripts for more than a dozen films, including The Sound and the Fury, Hombre, The Reivers, Murphy's Romance, and Stanley & Iris. They shared Oscar nominations in 1964 for their screenplays for Hud, a drama set in modern Texas and starring Paul Newman, and in 1980 for Norma Rae , a drama starring Sally Field in her Oscar-winning role as an impassioned Southern union organizer.

Perky people always have something upbeat to say, a cheerful hello to issue, a compliment to drop. In times such as these, they are a beacon of light in a storm-tossed sea of bitterness, anger, darkness. So why do we hate them? It's a question that hovers over "Happy Go Lucky," an oddball British movie that makes a courageous attempt to profile a woman who lives up to the title, always, in every situation. Like Spongebob, only human. I say courageous because any sort of comprehensive movie biography carries the implication of, at the very least, mood change.

Josey Aimes is the canary in the mine. For one thing, the gal with the dishwater mullet played by Charlize Theron in the stirring drama North Country is among the first female miners in a Minnesota iron works. For another, the single mom who needs the job to support her two kids isn't shy about complaining to her shop steward and to management that the men in the pits are sexually harassing her. When Josey files a grievance that she's had it up to here with their taunts, pornographic graffiti and groping, her steward and the company CEO all but say she's not man enough for the job. Set in the mid-1980s and loosely based on the lawsuit chronicled in Class Action: The Story of Lois Jensen and the Landmark Case That Changed Sexual Harassment Law, North Country is a movie in the inspirational spirit of Norma Rae. Unionizing a Southern textile factory where women work is hard enough.

Biopics and a war pic, colonial America and government paranoia, the songs of Johnny Cash and the raps of 50 Cent, cartoon twosomes, schoolboys with wands, a troupe of struggling hipsters breaking into song. If there's a dominant theme in the big movies of fall, darned if we can find it. But that's a good thing: The Hollywood fare between now and Thanksgiving promises the proverbial something for everybody, and quality-wise the studios may actually deliver. Big stars (Johnny Depp, Charlize Theron, Cameron Diaz, George Clooney)

Erin Brockovich, a true-life Cinderella story, is about a plucky blue-collar babe (Julia Roberts) who uses her Wonderbra as a slingshot and fells a utility company that has contaminated groundwater. The film builds up to an epochal showdown between Erin and the Stepmom/Goliath, then denies it to us. Instead, we see Erin's endless legwork (and her endless legs!) as she deploys gams and cleavage in pursuit of evidence against Pacific Gas & Electric, and as she collects each of 634 names needed to bring off a direct-action lawsuit.

OK, let's face it. Labor Day isn't exactly a watershed where holiday movies are concerned. So indulge us this labored proposition - labor films for Labor Day. You'll find no cartoons at your video store spreading animated myths about the founding of the American workers' movement. There are no musicals saluting the dignity of labor, unless you count laboring through the Jerry Lewis telethon as being work-related. Most of you won't care. You'll be out there picnicking and frolicking and basking in the last symbolic glow of summer.

The VCR has given parents unprecedented power to guide their children's movie viewing. Just as parents pass along their favorite books in hopes that their children will share the joy they once experienced in those pages, VCR owners can share transcendent movie moments. In fact, watching films together as a family can make them all the more meaningful. But what movies are appropriate? Might the content of more mature movies be too advanced? How relevant are the movie's ratings? And won't old movies be boring for children?

In her new comedy Soapdish, Sally Field plays an overdressed, overwrought, over-the-top, almost over-the-hill soap opera queen. She'll chew up the scenery - and anything else in her way. Celeste Talbert is America's Sweetheart, star of the country's most popular daytime drama, The Sun Also Sets, where the backstage intrigue is even more convoluted (and improbable) than the on-camera plot machinations. "Celeste is extremely neurotic, insecure, rather grabby," says Field. "She likes to pick on the little guy who can't fight back.

In Hollywood, where most directors fight to get their name above the title, Martin Ritt let the characters star. The filmmaker, who died last Saturday at the age of 76, was survived by his wife, Adele; his daughter, Martina Ritt Werner; his son, Michael, and some indelible characters named Hud, Norma Rae, and Stanley and Iris, not to mention a hound called Sounder. Martin Ritt was a sturdy, bullnecked guy who resembled the gruffest of bookies and spoke like the gentlest of scholars.