The Willmar 8

This film provides a very good portrait of eight ordinary midwestern middle class women, without much political, feminist, or labor consciousness, who go on strike against their small town bank employer to achieve equal status with the male employees. Lee Grant, in her directorial debut, deftly introduces the participants and lets them tell their own stories without heavy-handed commentary.

Lee Grant's perceptive film documents a lengthy strike (begun in December 1977) by women employees in a bank in Willmar, Minnesota, which exemplifies in microcosm many of the issues and attitudes facing women's rights movements. Combining interview footage with verite footage of the women involved. Grant has fashioned a film revealing the resistance of small-town, conservative America to social change.

Strike was called by underpaid bank workers faced with discrimination when men were being brought in to be trained by the women for managerial positions. Grant's on-the-spot interviews reveal resistance of townsfolk to become involved and the mainly empty, jawboning support of labor union officials. The church is also singled out as a factor supporting the male-dominated status quo.

Though a National Labor Relations Board ruling ultimately defeated the strikers and their subsequent employment histories have been unsatisfactory, pic celebrates their social victory. The struck bank's growth rate dipped and it was sold; working conditions for female bank workers have been upgraded and the eight women found a cause and a sense of community in their life together.

While suitably militant, film contains many funny, self-revealing statements by the interviewees.

My review was written in May 1981 after a screening at MoMA.