Unsportsmanlike Conduct

By RICHARD CORLISS

The images are indelible, in history and in movies: Henry Fonda agitating for farmworkers' rights in The Grapes of Wrath; Sally Field leading the textile workers in Norma Rae; even the young Marlon Brando finally realizing, in On the Waterfront, that good union guys could overcome corrupt union leaders. As Woody Guthrie songs were the sound track of America's organized working class, the movies offered snapshots of blue-collar heroism.

Flash forward. In the new film The Replacements, union members are portrayed as rich, uncaring, racist, sucker-punch-throwing goons. And the nonunion fellows who take the strikers' jobs--once they were called scabs--are ordinary Joes who are there not for the money but for the love of a job well done.

The Replacements, starring Keanu Reeves as the quarterback of a pickup team during a pro players' strike and Gene Hackman as his coach, is dumb by any standard. But it does anatomize the prevailing view of unions in a country that was largely built by them.

To most people today, the message of the old union films is distant and irrelevant. The mills and factories that unionists fought to organize are now in China and Mexico. This is the postindustrial age, when most new-media employees do quite well without collective bargaining. So do most Americans. We are fat and happy--and socially amnesiac.

If asked for their idea of a union leader, most folks might describe a paunchy guy who has the morals of a Mafia capo but with less colorful language and a cheaper suit. Or they'd think of the least representative members of organized labor, professional athletes. Strikes in the NBA, the NFL and Major League Baseball offer the spectacle of pampered millionaires demanding still more millions of dollars from their clubs and, ultimately, their fans. They have also deprived the American male of his constitutional right to get drunk watching large men collide with one another on TV.

So The Replacements, written by Vince McKewin and directed by Howard Deutch, isn't wrong to make fun of rich jocks. But it never addresses the ethics of union busting. The replacement players don't agonize for a second about taking jobs from players who earned them. And at the end, Hackman elegizes the scabs: "They had been part of something great." Come on: these guys didn't dig the Panama Canal. They helped rich owners satisfy billion-dollar contracts with TV networks.

I'm a little touchy on this subject just now because my wife Mary is on strike, and has been for 14 weeks. She and some other white-collar workers at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City are striking to raise the base pay from $17,000 to $20,000 and retain medical and other insurance benefits. The strikers have the support of prominent artists (like Sol LeWitt) and filmmakers (like Steven Spielberg). But the MOMA brass remain firm. "We think we've given a generous offer, and we're competitive with others in the field," a spokeswoman says.

The professionals on this picket line love their work; they're not in it for the money. And whereas the evil pro star in the movie pulls in $5 million a season, Mary, who runs one of the world's largest film-stills archives and in her 33 years at MOMA has organized dozens of exhibitions, is paid $45,196 a year. Today a replacement player is sitting in her office, and it's not Keanu Reeves.

This is why, as a movie critic and a husband, I'm not pleased with The Replacements. But I take heart from one good movie this summer that evokes the old union spirit. It stars a plucky organizer, celebrates feminist solidarity and ends with a triumph over rapacious bosses. All right, it's about poultry. But is there a snazzier vision of working women today than Chicken Run?