Northern Lights (1979)

NORTHERN LIGHTS  (1979)  ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: John Hanson, Rob Nilsson
    Robert Behling, Susan Lynch, Joe Spano,
    Henry Martinson, Marianne Astrom-DeFina
A movie you've probably never heard of, about a chapter in American history some folks on the Right would just as soon you didn't find out about, ever. The place is rural North Dakota. The year is 1915. Banks are foreclosing, railroads are raising their rates, grain prices are falling, and organizers are traveling the state in jalopies, trying to drum up support for the Nonpartisan League, pitching the radical idea that if the people who work the land band together, they just might stay alive and in business. It's a spare, passionate, uncompromising movie, shot on location in black and white. Most of the supporting roles are played by non-actors who look like the real thing. The living conditions it depicts are rough, and the working conditions are brutal. The threshing scene, in which a bunch of farmers team up to save a neighbor's crop in the middle of a blizzard, looks authentic enough to give you frostbite. There's a lot of "Days of Heaven" in this, but none of Terrence Malick's romanticized, pastoral beauty. And a lot of John Steinbeck. It's a movie no Hollywood studio would go near, much less know how to pull off. Imagine. A socialist masterpiece.