The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter
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| The Life and Time of Rosie the Riveter | |
|---|---|
| Directed by | Connie Field |
| Produced by | Connie Field |
| Starring | Wanita Allen Betty Allie Gladys Belcher Lyn Childs Lola Weixel Margaret Wright |
| Cinematography | Cathy Zheutlin Bonnie Friedman Robert Handley Emiko Omori |
| Editing by | Lucy Massie Phenix Connie Field |
| Distributed by | Clarity Films First Run Features |
| Release date(s) | September 27, 1980 |
| Running time | 65 min |
| Language | English |
| Official website | |
| Allmovie profile | |
| IMDb profile | |
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter is a 1981 documentary film by Connie Field which tells about the American women who went to work during World War II to do "men's jobs." In 1996, it was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as being "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".
The film's title refers to "Rosie the Riveter," the cultural icon that represented women who manned the manufacturing plants which produced munitions and material during World War II.
London, The Times, Friday November 20, 1981:
The Arts: Cinema
The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter ICA Cinema David Robinson
It is I realize, staining credulity to recommend as the most attractive and satisfying film of the week, offering a real experience for the money, a feature-length documentary on women’s munitions workers in Second World War America. I have already written about Connie Field’s "The Life and Times of Rosie the Riveter" from a couple of festivals, and have seen it, with increasing pleasure, more times than that. Its outstanding quality is that it is something that could be done in no other medium. A good many documentaries might just as well appear as newspaper or radio features or colour magazine spreads. But Rosie the Riveter uses to the full cinema's ability to recapture intact the look and the sentiments of past times, and sometimes expose its own previous mendacities.
Connie Field got the idea for the film from a California “Rosie the Riveter Reunion”; and, with grants from the National Endowment for the Humanities and other charitable sources, conducted interviews with many hundreds of women who had gone into war work. Out of these she choose five representatives -- three black, two white -- all marvelously lively, intelligent, attractive and articulate women who recall their experiences with a mixtures of pleasant nostalgia and detached bitterness.
The reminiscences are inter cut with the realities of the period – old news, films, recruiting trailers, March of Time ad pop songs of which “Rosie the Riveter” is not by any means the most awful. The old stuff is extraordinarily evocative of the period, of the great surge of emotional patriotism and the propaganda drives that sustained it. The old films shows the armies of the eager, smiling women working shoulder to shoulder with the men, their babies lovingly cared for in official crèches. A welder’s visor is snapped up to reveal the immaculately made-up face of an actress who delivers a tidy script about the fulfillment she finds in doing her duty.
It was not a bit like that, say the actual women, three decades on. The men did not want women and nobody wanted blacks. Sexist and racial discrimination was virulent; the struggle for unionization and fair wages was met with bullying and lockouts. Families were broken up; they never heard of crèches. Standards of hygiene and safety were terrible.
The women stayed –and stay –cheerful and funny and brave. They needed still more bravery after the war when their jobs had to go back to the men and the official propaganda changed. The films of the time now strove to return the women to their proper roles of cooking and sewing and serving; the government trailers offered horror pictures of the neglected and delinquent children of undutiful working mothers. Women who had acquired valuable skills could only find jobs as kitchen hands or lavatory attendants. But you cannot keep a good woman down. The resilience, spirit and humor of Connie Field’s indomitable heroines sends you out elated and loving them.
