The narrative is sanded smooth of any rough edges, and complex motivations are boiled down to justice vs. Rookie screenwriters Ginny Mohler and Brittany Shaw present a highly fictionalized, and greatly simplified, version of the Radium Girls’ story - as they went from lowly factory workers to media darlings. As Jo gets more ill, Bessie enlists a labor organizer, Wiley Stephens (Cara Seymour), to find other girls and mount a lawsuit against American Radium. Bessie, who would rather talk about Rudolph Valentino, meets a cute guy, Walt (Colin Kelly-Sordelet), who’s a Communist, and spurs Bessie toward activism. When the company doctor (Neal Huff) examines Jo, who is feeling anemic and losing teeth, he makes the same diagnosis - which doesn’t fly, because Jo’s a virgin.
Such deaths are diagnosed by the company doctor as syphilis, which is an effective lie because the girls who get sick don’t want to talk about it publicly. Some girls get sick and die, as Bessie and Jo’s sister Mary did three years earlier. The technique for getting a fine point on their camel-hair paint brushes is to lick the brush between strokes - thus causing them to ingest bits of the radioactive substance. The girls at the factory are taking radium internally as part of their jobs. Roeder (John Bedford Lloyd), as “liquid sunshine,” a miracle substance that is sold as an over-the-counter medicine. They gets a penny a dial to paint the luminous dots on watch dials, which glow in the dark because of Marie Curie’s discovery, radium - which is also touted by the boss, Mr. It’s 1925 in Orange, N.J., and the Cavallo sisters, Bessie (Joey King) and Josephine (Abby Quinn), earn what pennies they can to support themselves and their grandpa (Joe Grifasi) by working as “dial painters” at the local American Radium factory. The directors had a woman, Etta (Susan Heyward), taking pictures throughout the film and the pictures they used were the pictures she was taking to record the times.It’s difficult to get a handle on what feels off about “Radium Girls,” a combination of sisterly melodrama, courtroom drama and historical tale that never comes together.
#American radium movie movie#
At first, I found this a little disconcerting, but as the movie progressed, I realized how it really set the roaring twenties up for the audience. Throughout the film, they use actual shots of people in the 1920s. Mohler also wrote the script with Brittany Shaw. “Radium Girls” was directed by Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler. I felt all the performances were excellent. She carries “Radium Girls” and puts in a powerful performance. The girl is only 21 and already has 65 acting credits on her resume. I recognized King as Channing Tatum’s character’s daughter, Emily, in “White House Down.” She has an illustrious career ahead of her. This film was very reminiscent of “Silkwood,” starring Meryl Streep and Cher, which told the story of workers exposed to carcinogenic material. We know now that exposure to radium can cause cancer and a myriad of other problems for humans. I found myself wanting to scream, “Stop licking that brush and run out of there!”
To keep their paintbrush tips pointed, the women lick the paintbrushes with every stroke, getting radium on their tongues and down their throats. The women at the American Radium factory use radium to paint clock faces so that they glow in the dark.
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