Film

...On Company Business (produced by Allan Francovich and Howard Dratch, and directed by Francovich) is an enormously ambitious chronicle of the CIA's most ignoble operations, from the agency's creation at the end of World War II up to the present...

...The teaching manual aims "not only to heighten the viewers' understanding of the consequences of sex discrimination at work...

...The film's concern is not revelation (although there's no lack of the sensational kind), but the limning of a consistent U.S...

...The effect of the film is cumulative, and the case it makes adds up to a harrowing indictment of the manner in which we Americans do "business" abroad...

...It's possible that the film is well intentioned, but the use of a horror film format suggests that it was simply meant to exploit a subject of topical interest...

...The film is structured out of interviews, some bits of live material, and news film culled from archives...

...The most voluble and articulate of these belongs to Philip Agee, former CIA agent and author of Inside the Company, who is also credited as the film's "special consultant...

...It is a matter of record that ITT money was funneled through the CIA to opponents of Allende in Chile, but one would be hard put to come up with visual evidence of this collusion...

...The handbook should be available by the first of the year...

...Not only had word of the opening been kept from the women, they were expected to provide the neophyte with on-the-job training...

...I doubt that I know any more about the history of CIA wrongdoing than most other literate American paranoids, and I found nothing of importance in the film that I hadn't seen more thoroughly, and in some cases more forcefully, exposed in print...

...Shots of massive crowds milling in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, for example, hardly implicate the CIA in the overthrow of the democratically elected Goulart government...

...And the filmmakers generally manage to compensate for their inability to show what took place clandestinely through intelligent editing— for instance, the dramatic juxtaposition of the patently disingenuous testimony of those whose reputations depend on hiding the truth, with that of disillusioned agency insiders (and some victims) who have chosen to let the truth be known...

...But I believe the film can serve as a most effective primer—and would recommend it to anyone who feels that a concern for human rights is not incompatible with the conduct of foreign policy, and who is not already opposed to a new unleashing of the CIA...

...Their collective experience and the issues they raised have been captured in a compelling and singularly illuminating documentary film, The Willmar 8. According to an American Bankers Association survey, women hold 85 per cent of the clerical jobs in the nation's banks...

...It's a lovely illustration of solidarity, heartland-style...

...The three-hour-long story involves a large and generally well-known cast of characters, including all postwar U.S...

...The subject of the film is itself so arresting, however, that one's interest is held even in the absence of enhancing pictorials...

...The Boat Is Full Poignant and admirably reserved dramatization of a story baring the callous refusal of the Swiss to give sanctuary to refugees from Hitler during World War II...

...The subversion of Brazilian labor unions, the expenditure of huge sums to swing an election in Chile (and, later, to overthrow the democratically elected president), the training of Iranian and Latin American security police in interrogation by torture—it's all here...

...All the subtlety and insight of a made-for-television programmer...

...The struggle of the Willmar 8, moreover, has provided the material for an uncommonly affecting and intelligent film which is indeed, as one critic has put it, "the real life Nine to Five...

...But it is clear that they spent some time in Willmar, and their film shows us quite enough to get a good feel for this salt-of-the-earth town and the lives of the eight protagonists...

...It begins brilliantly, but after the first twenty minutes the movie focuses increasingly on the sidebar story of black rag pianist-outlaw Coalhouse Walker...

...of [Southern] immigrants and guest workers with filthy habits, bad manners, and the smell of garlic...

...Spanish...

...Covert operations mounted in Italy, France, Guatemala, Iran, Cuba, the Congo, Ecuador, Brazil, Uruguay, Chile, Angola, Iran (again), and Greece are treated...

...She breaks into tears when a companion says that she can spare her $40...

...One astonishing bit of found footage (an unidentified piece of anti-communist propaganda from the 1950s) is a dramatized depiction of the forceful takeover of a Wisconsin town by a group of pug-ugly Commie thugs...

...Because they began shooting in the middle of things the filmmakers couldn't record the entire history of the strike, nor were they able, despite repeated efforts, to represent the point of view of the bankers (the president and directors refused to be interviewed...

...In English...

...So., New York, NY 10016, Phone (212) 686-9890...

...To promote more active viewing of The Willmar 8, California Newsreel, the film's distributor, is preparing a Women's Worth Handbook for audience use at screenings...

...in other instances, however, the filmmakers apparently found it impossible to come up with archival material to illustrate their well-researched investigation into Company doings...

...The Willmar 8 is handled by California Newsreel, 630 Na-toma St., San Francisco, CA 94103, Phone (415) 621-6196...

...And while the Citizen's Bank was not brought to its knees (its profits dropped off, the president retired, and the bank was eventually sold), the strike was the source of much anxiety in American banking, and has apparently spurred the adoption of less discriminatory policies in many counting houses...

...Paul Rotha, "Some Principles of Documentary," 1935...

...Most of the mischief described is so contemptible as to inspire incredulity (although everything is verifiable), but the part which we are shown to have played in violating the political, civil, and human rights of other people is especially distressing...

...Presidents, some foreign heads of state, Cabinet secretaries, CIA directors, members of Congress, union officials, business leaders, and a handful of disaffected Company employes who have chosen to go public with information the agency would rather keep under wraps...

...On December 16, 1977, eight women who worked at the Citizen's Bank of Willmar, Minnesota, went out on strike...

...This bizarre mini-drama effectively conveys the Red Scare hysteria of the period...

...The women filed sex discrimination charges with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, and charges of unfair labor practices with the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB)—and set up a picket line...

...guay, one interviewee testifies, U.S.-supplied field telephones are used to administer electric shock to the genitals of political prisoners...

...After admitting to some embarrassment and hesitation, one of the younger women (whose marriage has broken up in the course of the strike) confesses that she doesn't have enough money to get through the week...

...Francovich and Dratch, as a result, have had to rely on interviews with CIA opponents and apologists, and to regale the viewer with a generally less than thrilling gazingstock of talking heads...

...Acouple of films recently brought to my attention share Paul Rotha's view of purposeful documentary, and because they focus on issues frequently dealt with in these pages, they may be of more than usual interest to readers of The Progressive...

...With only about 30 per cent of the country's 15,000 banks unionized, it follows that great numbers of women employed by American banks work at extraordinarily ill-paid, dead-end jobs, and enjoy virtually none of the benefits and protections won decades ago by organized labor...

...Nor can much be shown to document the complex interconnections between American foreign policy, CIA chores abroad, and the interests of U.S.-based multinational corporations...

...None of them considered herself a feminist, nor had any shown the slightest interest in unionism or social activism beforehand— yet their struggle quickly educated them in each, and they managed through much hardship to sustain the longest bank strike in American history (reported in The Progressive, August 1978 and February 1979...

...It is from these old clips, which are generally fascinating, that the film achieves its greatest visual impact: shots of the invasion of the Bay of Pigs, of Chilean planes fire-bombing Santiago's Moneda palace in the last days of Salvador Allende's presidency, of captured American mercenaries on trial for their lives in Angola, of SAVAK's torture chambers in Iran, and on and on...

...One particularly moving sequence records a meeting of the women in the Willmar Trades and Labor Assembly Home held to assess their hardships and needs...

...Ragtime Much of Doctorow's kaleidoscopic novel hasn't made it into this film adaptation, including no small amount of social criticism and several of the book's most fascinating real life characters (Freud and Emma Goldman, for example...

...While it communicates some factual information by means of title cards, On Company Business otherwise avoids direct narration...

...What's more, they were continually passed over when better paying, more responsible jobs opened up...

...The female tellers and bookkeepers at the Citizen's Bank earned, on the average, between $400 and $500 a month, with no additional pay for overtime...

...Actress-filmmaker Lee Grant signed on as director and narrator...

...at home and in local coffee shops they vent their anger over the indignities they suffered on the job, and they discuss the changes the strike brought about in their lives...

...While this painstakingly prepared and researched film unloads a wealth of information, the material in On Company Business will probably not be news to the already well informed...

...Director Milos Forman does the best he can, but he is not well served by a screenplay that reduces a complex historical work to a social problem film...

...foreign policy, one served by a CIA that has, over the years, sought to destabilize or overthrow leftist governments and truss up regimes of the right...

...Montenegro Dusan Makavejev's black, semi-surreal comedy, depicting the sexual and psychic dislocations attending the invasion of bourgeois Northern Europe by "the new invisible nation...

...Written and directed by exiled Swiss filmmaker Marcus Imhoff...

...but to refocus their attention upon their own career hopes and expectations of working life, help them articulate grievances, reevaluate traditional work roles, reconsider their own place in the process of social change, and suggest activities that will involve the viewers in investigating and publicizing possible sex bias at their own and other places of employment in their community...

...On Company Business can be rented from Unifilm, 1550 Bryant St., San Francisco, CA 94103, Phone (415) 864-7755...

...Efforts to negotiate higher pay and equitable promotion policies were met by the bank president's assertion that "We're not all equal, you know...

...It seems clear, nonetheless, that the lives of these eight gutsy women were profoundly affected by their experience...

...In UruMichael H. Seitz is a teacher of film studies and a New York-based critic of film and television...

...thanks to the strike they uncovered individual abilities and resources that had previously escaped their notice...

...These are the real materials of purposeful documentary...

...As a work of cinema, On Company Business is thus handicapped by its very subject: Covert operations naturally defy visual representation, at least in an authentic documentary mode...

...Ticket to Heaven A disappointing and thoroughly predictable treatment of the exploitation of lonely, disillusioned young Americans by Moonie-style religious cults...

...They picket in the cold and snow (one woman allows that in sub-zero temperatures "you walk real fast...

...The following summer, when Willmar native Mary Beth Yarrow (wife of Peter Yarrow, of Peter, Paul and Mary fame) was visiting her hometown, she learned of the strike, and decided to make a film on this unexpected outburst of feminist unionism in the midst of Middle America...

...Who is really in trouble...

...The Willmar 8, as it happens, were rebuffed by the NLRB...

...M Hits and Misses Blood Wedding Carlos Saura's film of a rehearsal of Antonio Gades's flamenco dance adaptation of the Garcia Lorca tragedy...

...Film audiences, unfortunately, tend to passivity in the face of even the most engaging and provocative social documentaries...

...asks the group's leader and oldest member...

...Beautiful, tasteful, ingeniously cinematic—and supremely...

...Their decision to strike was all but final when a $700-a-month position in the loan department went to a young man with no previous experience...

...Each acquired a great measure of self-respect through what they did together...

...or 491 Park Ave...