For many people Labor Day has become a marker for the end of summer, but let’s take a moment to remember its original purpose: to celebrate the hard work that people perform year-round. The movies have long been treated as an escape from the working world, which makes the subject of work something of a taboo in entertainment. Yet many films and television programs have still tackled the subject, often for humor—indeed, the workplace comedy constitutes its own subgenre. More serious films, ranging from WPA-era American documentaries to more recent Chinese features like Blind Shaft, have generated drama from sequences of people engaged in backbreaking, even life-risking toil. And then there’s the arena of labor union narratives, with movies like Martin Ritt’s Norma Rae or the recent French drama At War, that valorize the efforts of working people to fight for the rights they deserve from their employers.
The Working Girls The last film to date of the highly talented Stephanie Rothman, whose disappearance from active filmmaking ranks with the most regrettable developments of that nose-dive decade. Unfortunately, The Working Girls finds Rothman plainly fed up with the limitations of the exploitation genre, and the wit, stylistic assurance, and feminist subtexts she was able to insert in her earlier work in the field (The Student Nurses, The Velvet Vampire) are largely lacking here. Sarah Kennedy, Laurie Rose, and Lynne Guthrie are three overeducated women looking for some kind of employment in the wasteland of southern California; Solomon Sturges (son of Preston), Mary Beth Hughes, and Cassandra Peterson costar (1974). —Dave Kehr
