![]() Historical footage of an early 20th-century protest Instead of merely individualizing the American Radium Company and its executives as bad actors in an otherwise just system, the filmmakers show that the radium girls were one piece in a larger fight for workers’ rights and safety. The punch of the film, in many ways, comes from the broad historical contextualization of the women’s struggle for compensation from their employer. However, overall they chose to handle it delicately, preferring not to depict more disfiguring stages of the disease. ![]() We see Josephine lose a tooth and later a piece of her jaw, and Doris (who has a more advanced case) clearly possesses rotting teeth. Pilcher and Mohler nod to it in a few ways. Still from Radium Girlsīefore watching this film, I was curious how the filmmakers would handle the gruesomeness of radium necrosis - the disease experienced by many dial painters, where radium poisoning would literally rot their jaws. Like a real group of dial painters from Orange, New Jersey, the young women that lead this film - Bessie (Joey King), Josephine (Abby Quinn), Doris (Colby Minifie), and Paula (Olivia Macklin) - battle the company that sentenced them to death through its negligence and deceit. Radium Girls dives into this history, fictionalizing its lead protagonists, but including many historical figures among its characters. These young women ingested the radioactive substance, having no idea for years that radium was eating their bones inside out. ![]() The method of painting? Lick the paint brush to create a fine point in the bristles, dip in the radium paint, and paint a letter. Radium companies recruited young women in their teens and twenties to paint the glowing numbers on watch-faces, many of which were used by soldiers in the World Wars. Clock face with glowing dials superimposed over war footageĭial-painting, then, was big business. Radium also had a luminescent quality, making it popular for glow-in-the-dark consumer goods like watches and clocks. Thought to be a magical cure-all, you could find it in tonics and pills sold widely to people looking for renewed vitality. Radium Girls (Lydia Dean Pilcher and Ginny Mohler, 2018) takes its inspiration from the infuriating history of watch-dial painters of the 1910s-1930s who were poisoned and then abandoned by the radium industry.ĭiscovered in 1898 by the Curies, radium was all the rage in the early decades of the 20th century.
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