You won't be disappointed!

Just perfect...

I cannot think of one single thing that I would change about this film. The acting is incomparable, the directing deft, and the writing poignantly brilliant.

This is a must-see and one of the best documentaries - and films - of this year.

"Norma Rae" is an entertaining film. It is also interesting and enlightening because it depicts the beginning of the end of the textile and garment manufacturing industry in this country. The portrayals are excellent representations of folks with good intentions that, once implemented, will have unintended horrible consequences. Sally Field is excellent as the bumpkin who is taken in by the slick New York union organizer (excellently played by Ron Liebman). Will she then manage to get the rest of her co-workers to go along? This is a real slice of Americana, and there is an element of pathos, too, when one realizes that these good people were unwittingly sowing the seeds of destruction for their industry.

A good acting vehicle for Sally Field, who did show her chops. She only occasionally overdoes the Southern accent. The plot is about union organizing in a Southern textile mill. Surprisingly they do not go too far in depicting management recalcitrance, not even portraying violence from them. Less surprisingly, they also ignore union violence and intimidation, a standard tactic. Well, the textile industry did unionize in the Seventies and Eighties, and it died in the Nineties. All those jobs are now in Guatemala and Bangladesh. Interestingly, the only real energy left in the union movement is in government workers, as they have no competition to hold back union excesses.

Hard to understand, why on IMDb the movie only has a rating of 7, it deserves much better than this. Wonderful sets, cast, cinematography and plot. Everything beyond perfection! It's a touching story and the movie portrays it well. I have always liked stories that are about justice, while old black and white movies lived up to the expectation, this is relatively newer one and it didn't disappoint. The length is just ideal, it finishes at the right point though leaves much curiosity and longing that it should have lasted more. Great movies are about this. Dialogues are inspiring and background music is impactful. The movie also has one of my favourite songs! Couldn't have asked for more...

This is a rather nice movie, more gentle than disturbing, despite the social conflict involved. Ron Liebman, a union representative, comes down to a textile mill in the South and tries to organize the workers. He runs into indifference from the good folk of Shinbone or Monkey Junction or whatever it is, and hostility from the management of the plant. His first convert is Norma Rae, Sally Field, and she gradually develops an all-consuming enthusiasm, a moral calling, to get the union established. It costs her a good deal. Management attempts to buy her off by promoting her to a position in which she must check her father's work. Humiliating for him. He dies. She neglects her family -- her four kids of varying legitimacy and the guy she's living with, Beau Bridges. She was never exactly a flower of Southern womanhood but now she's become a mover and shaker and it naturally upsets people. But under Liebman's patient and humane guidance she recruits just about everyone and the union wins.Written and directed by the team that brought us "Hud" and "Hombre", it's remarkable as much for what doesn't happen as for what does.First, though, this cleared the path through the woods for any number of later films featuring declasse floozies who fight injustice -- "Erin Brokovich" being an example. This is an original and gets bonus points for it.As for what it leaves out, there is a set up for an affair between the charming Liebman and the frustrated Field -- but it doesn't happen, not even when the two are swimming alone, bare-assed, in a muddy river and talking about their private lives. What a temptation THAT must have been for the writers and if they had less in the way of resolution, it would have happened.The writers also managed to neatly sidestep the temptation to turn the mill's management into a horde of rotten, filthy, violent lawbreakers. They're hostile, yes, and careless about the welfare of their employees. (The women can't leave their posts, even when they're having their periods.) However, they are not evil thugs skulking in the shadows and they don't put the nocuous Liebman in the hospital. Management violates the law only in small ways. Liebman -- who is very law-savvy -- has a legal right to post his recruiting letters on the company bulletin board but management posts them so high up that only Wilt Chamberlain on stilts could read them. The only violence, and it's brief, is when some white workers clobber a black employee under the impression that African-Americans are banding together to lead the union so they can order the white folks around.The script isn't flawless. Ron Liebman is the sophisticated Jewish New Yorker who brings enlightenment to this benighted Southern outpost of civilization. He's a paragon of normality with no weaknesses. He introduces Field to Dylan Thomas. He teaches her Yiddishisms. A stereotype. I wish we'd been able to see him in some devalued activity. Maybe he could have a collection of panties in his dresser drawer or something.And the bravura scene in which Norma Rae is fired and about to be thrown out of the deafeningly noisy mill. She leaps to a table top and holds up a printed sign reading UNION. The employees stare at her without expression. Eons seem to pass while she slowly rotates so that everyone can read the sign. Then one woman turns off her machine. Slowly, one by one, the others follow suit until finally the mill is completely and shockingly silent. A great movie moment but it jars with its lack of logic. When the final vote is taken, almost half the employees vote AGAINST the union. So where were these right-to-work people when the machines were being shut down? I've singled out these two flaws because they are buried under the multitude of virtues in the rest of the script. The story is pretty moving, and I applaud it for sticking as closely as it does to reality. When they part after their joint success, Liebman and Field don't even kiss good-bye. It's hard to imagine.