Product Details

• Directors: Barbara Kopple
• Format: Closed-captioned, Color, NTSC
• Rated: PG-13 (Parental Guidance Suggested)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: HBO Home Video
• VHS Release Date: December 6, 1993
• Run Time: 98 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (18 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6302593476
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #264,077 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

Director Barbara Kopple's Oscar-winning rendering of a crippling strike at a Minnesota meat-packing plant may look dated, but the underlying theme of individuals crushed by big business remains all too timely. Using a briskly engrossing combination of first-person interviews, news broadcasts, and fly-on-the-wall encounters, Kopple creates an indelible document of a community's dissolution at the hands of larger forces. (The film is clearly on the side of the workers, but at the same time it refuses to ignore the petty infighting that eventually helped contribute to their ruin.) An alternately depressing, uplifting, and often profanely funny film that, at times, echoes Michael Moore's Roger and Me , but without that movie's distancing smarm. A movie's title has never seemed quite so bitterly apt. The director, who had previously won an Oscar for the equally arresting Harlan County USA, would later go on to document yet another traumatic event with Woody Allen's Wild Man Blues. --Andrew Wright

From The New Yorker

Barbara Kopple's documentary, about a strike in a Minnesota meatpacking plant, is a lucid and unfussy piece of movie journalism that manages to be as complexly affecting as a great novel. The story that she tells here is a terrifying one. The workers at the Austin, Minnesota, plant of Geo. A. Hormel & Company decide to go on strike on August 17, 1985, rather than accept a rollback of their wages and benefits. The union, Local P-9 of the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union, is led by a militant president, Jim Guyette, and a fiery freelance consultant, Ray Rogers. Together, Guyette and Rogers create a terrific spirit of energy and resolve in the rank and file. But Lewie Anderson, a veteran negotiator for the international union, thinks that their strategy is "doomed." As the strike wears on, our reactions to what we're seeing become more volatile. Our hearts are with the pumped-up rank and file of P-9, but our heads, increasingly (and surprisingly), are with the pragmatic Anderson: his anaylsis of the local's chances against the company proves accurate in virtually every particular. The defeat of the stubborn P-9ers is agonizing to watch, and we begin to realize that Kopple's apparently even tone has nothing to do with objectivity or resignation-that it is, rather, the exaggerated calm of deep shock, the voice of an eyewitness to a smashup on the highway. The movie embodies a kind of tragic understanding of American life-tragic in the original and the fullest sense, in which the spectacle of unspeakable calamity produces pity and terror and then an unforeseeable and penetrating clarity. This is a masterpiece of social art. Academy Award for best documentary in 1991. -Terrence Rafferty
Copyright © 2006 The New Yorker

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A haunting film..., April 10, 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: American Dream [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This movie is so dramatically powerful, it's hard to believe it's real life. It's the devastating story of what happens to a small town when it's only industry turns against it. The characters are larger-than-life and the movie sticks with you long after it's over. The viewer is taken on an emotional roller coaster ride from the hopeful beginnings of the strike to the crushing end. Having family in Austin, MN (where the film takes place), I can say that this movie hits the nail on the head all too well. See this film. It's a truly moving experience.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An excellent film about the evolution and effect a strike, August 11, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: American Dream [VHS] (VHS Tape)

This documentary traces the development of labor unrest at a company that is planning to make substantial reductions in employees' pay. The story is told primarily from the employees' viewpoint, and includes elements of corporate campaigning, local versus international union politics, internal politics, the strike, and loss of employees' jobs. The human perspective is fully developed including emotional peaks and valleys, the strife within families, the decay of relationships between workers, and the the affect on the community.

The documentary is extremely well filmed and very moving.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Powerful document... but be warned..., January 29, 2000

By 

Benjamin J. Zelkowicz (Valencia, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: American Dream [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Though it doesnt achieve the dramatic heights of "Harlan County, USA" this film is nonetheless a moving and disturbing document of workers and unions in battle with management, organized labor, and themselves. I have to believe that the person below who cheered the "crushing victory" of management over people who want "to earn more for doing less" was joking. This is a film about meat packers, a thoroughly disgusting job if there ever was one, who try to organize against the Hormel company, which is trying to slash their wages by $2 (It seems to me like management wants to pay the workers less for doing more). Unlike Harlan County, USA, though, the conflict of this film is mostly within the ranks of labor. The battle between international and local unions and between different strategies is what ultimately undermines the the worker's chances for success. A cheery film this is not, but an important one that anyone who cares about our American system of labor and corporate culture should see, along with Harlan County, Roger and Me, and Matewan. Be warned that there are many shots inside the met packing plant, complete with the evisceration and decapitation of many many pigs. It made me very glad I don't eat pork...