Salt of the Earth (1954) on Netflix
Mexican-American miners at New Mexico's Empire Zinc mine strike over unsafe conditions and unequal wages. Ramon Quintero helps organize them while treating his pregnant wife, Esperanza, unfairly.
- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.3/104,618 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes100%
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Cast
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Salt of the Earth (1954)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Shooting Salt of the Earth in New Mexico in 1953 was hazardous: the trade press denounced it as a subversive plot, anti-Communist vigilantes fired rifle shots at the set, and the film's leading lady, Rosaura Revueltas, was deported to Mexico. The secretly edited film was then kept in an anonymous wooden shack in Los Angeles.
- After opening in New York City, Salt of the Earth went unseen for a decade: only thirteen American theaters were willing to show it, IATSE's Roy Brewer used his ties with the projectionists' union to cancel bookings, and the American Legion threatened to picket any theater that screened it.
- The U.S. House of Representatives denounced Salt of the Earth for its communist sympathies, and the FBI investigated the film's financing, looking for foreign funds that could justify prosecution under the Foreign Agents Registration Act.
- Before shooting started in Silver City, New Mexico, the press already called the film dangerous and subversive because blacklisted professionals made it and the Mine Mill union, expelled from the CIO in 1950, helped fund it. The Hollywood Reporter and Newsweek attacked it, Newsweek headlining its piece "Reds in the Desert".
- After filming ended, laboratories refused to process Salt of the Earth, delaying postproduction work for months. Producer Paul Jarrico recalled carrying cans of film around the country and putting it through different labs under phony names.
- The director was reluctant to cast Juan Chacón, a real-life union local president, as Ramón, thinking him too "gentle", but Revueltas and the director's sister-in-law Sonja Dahl Biberman urged him to give Chacón the part.
- Salt of the Earth dramatizes the 1951 strike against the Empire Zinc Company in Grant County, New Mexico; in the film the company is renamed "Delaware Zinc" and the setting is called "Zinc Town, New Mexico".
- A pro-labor institution in Tucson, Arizona, the "Salt of the Earth Labor College", is named after the film; it holds lectures and forums on unionism and economic justice and screens the film on a frequent basis.
