It’s not a great film, but it’s a lot more than an interesting artifact.īut I was startled by the clarity of the story which Duke finesses from the over-eager and overly earnest Leslie Lee/Ron Milner script, which throws a whirlwind of characters, conflicts and events at us hoping that we’ll keep up. “Floor” looks too much like a “TV movie” of the day for its own good. As it turns out, he returns to town just in time for all the wage pressure/job shortage/racism stuff to come to a head.Īs I mentioned earlier, there’s a clumsiness to the integration of different film stocks and the reliance on voice-over to tell us what we can figure out for ourselves. Thomas? He takes one beating (for being “mouthy”) too many and decides the Army’s for him. And that’s how he finds himself going toe to toe with the “packers” (corporate, represented by Mahoney) and with older workers like the jaded Heavy ( Moses Gunn). That’s how he’s recruited for the meat packing union. That’s how the guys end up at the sea of cattle and meat processing known as The Stockyards, an eight-story killing machine where “they didn’t waste NOTHING” - tail to hides, steaks to brains.ĭuke shows us about as much of this as PBS would allow in 1984.įrank gets his start mopping blood off the floor, and trying to keep his head down as the Poles and Slavs who dominated the workforce bellyached that “there’s as many of them as there are of cattle.” “The Great Migration” was underway, and war or no war - white jobs were being threatened.įrank finds himself befriending the Pole Bremer ( Clarence Felder). Cheeks (August Wilson favorite Stephen McKinley Henderson).
That city-within-a-city in Southside Chicago included a support system, where the YMCA provided job counseling/placement through M. He and his traveling partner Thomas ( Ernest Rayford) are startled on arrival to see that “colored folk had built their own city.” It’s a rough-hewn film, crudely incorporating newsreel footage of the day with grim, unblinking cattle slaughterhouse footage of today and leaning far too much on voice over narration to tell its story of one member of the African American diaspora who came to Chicago from Mississippi to find himself in the middle of a labor struggle and a racial one.īut it’s impressive in its detail and startling in its ambition, and thanks to capturing a legion of actors about to become famous - from Alfre Woodard and Dennis Farina to Ted Levine, Mary Alice, Stephen McKinley Henderson and John Mahoney - beautifully acted.ĭamien Leake is Frank Custer, a sharecropper who leaves behind his wife (Woodard) and family to seek work in the Big City during the Great War. “The Killing Floor,” newly restored for Film Movement, is a well-researched, swirling period piece about the real people who integrated Chicago’s stockyards and unions in events leading up to the city’s post-World War I race riots of 1919.
Killing floor 3 world tv#
Spielberg’s breakout “Duel” is the best known example.īut PBS, keeping to its enlighten/educate mission, turned out quality films on important hot-button subjects via its series, “American Playhouse.” That’s where “The Killing Floor” found its home, an early work of resonant power from African American actor-filmmaker Bill Duke, who would go on to direct lots of TV and some solid genre films, “A Rage in Harlem” and “Hoodlum.” Long before the streaming services made the label “made for television movie” respectable, there were stand-outs in the stepsister genre that showed you didn’t need Hollywood backing to make a good movie.
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