![]() Flint ( Neal Huff ), a corporate shill who diagnoses the sick women with syphilis Arthur Roeder ( John Bedford Lloyd ), the greedy radium executive desperate to silence his dying employees and Mr. Am ong the heroes, there’s Wiley Stephens ( Cara Seymour ), a trailblazing and compassionate member of the Consumers League Walt ( Collin Kelly-Sordelet ), a young communist who becomes romantically involved with Bessie Etta ( Susan Heyward ), an African American activist filmmaker and Doris ( Colby Minifie ), another dial painter whose advanced stage of radium poisoning has swollen her face and affected her brain. The court of public opinion – ‘Radium Girls’Īs the film’s narrative evolves into court drama, the ensemble expands to include a number of allies and villains played by a who’s who of both well-established and up-and-coming character actors. ![]() Subscribe to Hollywood Insider’s YouTube Channel, by clicking here. Related article: MUST WATCH – Hollywood Insider’s CEO Pritan Ambroase’s Love Letter to Black Lives Matter – VIDEO The girls’ pleas for medical help fall upon deaf ears so, along with some of their afflicted coworkers, they soon become embroiled in a sprawling legal battle against their employers. Played by Joey King, Bessie has Amy ’s impetuosity but develops Beth ’s passion for humanitarianism when she realizes her sister is being poisoned. Younger sister Bessie doesn’t like the taste of the paint and instead uses her fingers to dab her brush this earns her fewer wages and the displeasure of her supervisors, but drastically reduces her exposure to radiation. Early on, she wins a grimly symbolic bottle of Radithor for painting the most dials in a month. As played by Abby Quinn, Josephine is bookish like Jo March while having the sensibility of Meg. They have lost their parents, but also their eldest sister Mary, who was a dial painter as well before dying young of an illness officially diagnosed as syphilis. They also decorate their faces with the radium-laced paint while reading passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead and conducting seances, their preoccupation with death is no doubt due to its omnipresence in their society.įor sisters Bessie and Josephine, the presence of death is even closer to home. The heroines of the film are pocket watch dial painters, instructed to lick the tips of their radium-laced paintbrushes for maximum efficiency, earning one cent per painted face while being ironically unaware of what little time they have left. ![]() Radium Girls opens with a traveling salesman dressed as a circus ringleader vivaciously touting the benefits of drinking radiated water, also known as Radithor. It is a world racing to implement the discoveries of Tesla, Edison, and Marie Curie. Of course, it is also a world in the midst of staggering scientific progress. Related article: Live Updates: USA Election, President-ELECT Joe Biden Receives Highest Number of Votes in USA History Related article: President Joe Biden & VP Kamala Harris – Hollywood Insider and CEO Pritan Ambroase Congratulates Our Official Endorsements! It is also a world in which discrimination on the basis of sex, race, political ideology, and economic class are routinely justified. It is a world further devastated by the incredibly deadly Spanish Flu, a disease that was especially deadly for young people, was intensified due to the war’s creation of poor health conditions, and whose reality was both ignored and willfully suppressed due to the incumbent political establishment’s preoccupation with conflict. It is a world devastated by World War 1, a global conflict that saw young men sent to their deaths by the millions. Set in the late 1920s, the world of Radium Girls is one where American women have had universal suffrage for less than a decade. There’s a lot of historical contexts to process with a film like this, and engaging with that context here reveals both the immensity of the drama and the number of parallels to our current reality. Radium to discredit their righteous cause and attempt to turn public opinion against them, the girls strive to ally themselves with activists, scientists, lawyers, and members of the Consumers League to create real change. Despite deliberate misinformation paid for by U.S. Radium, a corrupt and monolithic corporation that prioritized its own interests over the livelihoods of its employees and its customers. Against great odds, the radium girls rallied together to challenge U.S. Distribution delays and COVID-19 caused the film’s wide release to be delayed, but there’s something quite opportune about seeing the film in the wake of the 2020 presidential election. Radium Girls, a new film from directors Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, first screened at the 2018 Tribeca Film Festival.
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