Labor Day Entertainment

As this blog tends to be very comedy-centric, it's difficult to even come up with a very short list of favorite Hollywood feature films about Labor Day. Documentaries (Barbara Kopple's 1976 film Harlan County, USA) on labor movements, yes, absolutely, but Hollywood movies, besides Martin Ritt's Norma Rae, Paul Schrader's Blue Collar, Norman Jewison's F.I.S.T. (co-written by its star, Sylvester Stallone, with Joe Estherhaus) and John Sayles' Matewan, not so much.

Thinking of "jobs and working conditions you hate", sequences involving assembly lines in Chaplin's Modern Times and the René Clair flick that inspired it, À Nous la Liberté, immediately come to mind.





Thinking of the working conditions and the 19th century style approach to employees' rights that spawned the labor movement in the first place, a certain sketch from Your Show Of Shows comes to mind. It's a spoof of the kind of movies made in the first decade of the 20th century, the heydey of Florence Lawrence, the Biograph girl. It both parodies the earliest American narrative movies in a very funny way and points out the kinds of abuses that led to the formation of the labor movement. As usual, the cast of Imogene Coca, Sid Caesar, Carl Reiner and Howard Morris is hilarious.



While the 1978 film Norma Rae, starring Sally Field and Beau Bridges, is certainly a stellar flick about the labor movement, here at Way Too Damn Lazy To Write A Blog, we like this sendup from SCTV, "My Factory My Self," more. It manages to skewer a bunch of then-trendy movies from that era (including Kramer Vs. Kramer and An Unmarried Woman) and 1970's pop culture cliches mercilessly. Andrea Martin, arguably the greatest living comedienne not named Carol Burnett, is particularly brilliant here.



Early 1930's Warner Brothers/First National features such as Heroes For Sale and Wild Boys Of The Road, gritty Great Depression films about a society in which there were no jobs, tend to be my personal picks for this weekend. Happy Labor Day - and we sincerely hope those of you who are working today are either getting time-and-a-half or double time.