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May Day Films to Inspire You With Solidarity

From Modern Times to Harlan County USA.

As we celebrate May Day, the International Workers’ Holiday, we might want to watch a movie that inspires us in our own struggles. But there aren’t that many great movies about the workers’ struggle. The reason is obvious—capitalists control Hollywood. Their class interest is in promoting the status quo, not radical change. Still, a century of movie history has led to some great films about the class struggle, anti-colonialism, and other leftist causes. Here are 20 of my favorites, in order of their release date. May watching them inspire you with solidarity!

The Battleship Potemkin (1925). From the moment of film’s invention, both capitalists and socialists understood the power of the moving image to influence people. The Soviet government made so many powerful propaganda films to solidify their revolution in the 1920s. Sergei Eisenstein was the best of all the early Soviet directors. His film dramatizing the 1905 Russian ship rebellion, part of that year’s great revolutionary struggle, makes you want to overthrow the corrupt Tsarist state a century later. If you like this, try Earth, The Extraordinary Adventures of Mr. West in the Land of the Bolsheviks, Strike, and some of the other astonishing early Soviet films.

Modern Times (1936). Charlie Chaplin was a committed socialist and as his fame grew, he included more politics in his films. Modern Times is a fantastic comedy about working class life that any viewer could relate to. He plays his famous Tramp character once again, but this time finds himself the subject of a corporate experiment to feed workers through automation so they work harder, gets spied on in the bathroom by the boss, and accidentally leads a strike. It’s a fantastic look at life under capitalism while also being funny and sweet.

The Grapes of Wrath (1940). John Steinbeck’s famous novel about Oklahoma migrants to California was not explicitly leftist. Neither was John Ford’s 1940 film adaptation starring Henry Fonda in an iconic role as Tom Joad. But the Great Depression opened Hollywood up to a little more lefty politics in the movies. Ford turned the novel into a powerful vision of how an entire class of farmworkers were chewed up and spat out by an America lying to its working class.

Salt of the Earth (1954). In 1950, Mexican mine workers organized with Mine, Mill went on strike in New Mexico. They worked and lived in horrible conditions. They won that strike when women took over on the picket lines after a court banned the union members from striking. At the same time, Mine, Mill leadership was under attack for their communist leadership. A group of blacklisted filmmakers came to New Mexico and used the workers and the organizers themselves to dramatize the strike. The filmmakers underwent police harassment and the female star was deported to Mexico during the shooting. It disappeared for decades before a rediscovery. When I show it to my students, I ask them how this film is communist, the justification for its blacklisting. They don’t get it—the film is about decent living conditions, indoor plumbing, and basic respect on the job. If that’s communism, sign me up.

A Generation (1955). Andrzej Wajda was the great filmmaker of Polish freedom. Later in his career, he got in trouble with the authorities for making films critical of the communist government, such as Man of Marble, which uses the story of an exceptional worker in the ‘50s to discuss the corruption of the communist ideal. But in 1955, Wajda’s film about the role of socialism in the Polish resistance to the Nazis still makes me want to take up arms against the fascists today. A powerful, brilliant film.

The Organizer (1963). Mario Monicelli’s film is probably the best film ever made about a labor strike. Starring Marcello Mastroianni as an anarchist organizer fleeing the police who leads Italian textile workers in a strike, The Organizer does a wonderful job of showing the ups and downs of an early 20th-century strike that is doomed to fail but that........

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