![]() The production soars higher when concentrating on the watch dial factory floor or the girls at home, nicely incorporating hints of the Egyptian craze which was ongoing at the time. Walt’s friends, a Black couple whose race is never commented upon in 1925, Thomas (Brandon Gill) and photographer Etta (Susan Heyward), pave the way for the filmmakers to offer historical montages about all manner of issues including unions that all have the air of recreations made for the History Channel. The film’s weak point is in bridging that gap, done via the character of Walt (Collin Kelly-Sordelet), a romantic interest who introduces Bessie to the local Communist Party before promptly fading into the background. In nicely written contrast, King’s Bessie is less educated, more in tune with the pop culture of the time, providing her a nice character arc as she is transformed into an activist. It is horrific to watch her deteriorate before our eyes, the filmmakers utilizing just enough gore to emphasize radium’s devastating consequences. Quinn is riveting as the older, more well read sister Jo, a doomed romantic heroine of high order. These, he will tell them, result in a diagnosis of syphilis despite Jo’s protestations that her status as a virgin makes this impossible. Flint (Neal Huff, "Split") visits and declares Jo as fit as a horse, but is pressed to conduct tests. The next morning she stops Roeder and asks for a doctor to be sent for her sister, who is also suffering severe joint pain. When she enters the bathroom despite Jo’s protests and finds her sister in the bath, her mouth bloody and one of her teeth resting on the tub’s rim, Bessie recalls reading that Leach warned Mary against licking the tip of her paintbrush. Leach’s office, Bessie is dismayed to find a picture of her deceased older sister Mary, whose diaries she has recently found and is reading. The film opens with a snake oil salesman of the time promoting radium as ‘liquid sunshine,’ before we are introduced to the Cavallo sisters and their friends, who so enjoy their access to this faddish fluid, they use it to paint their faces and nails to glow in the dark after hours. Also true is that the radium dial painting companies not only knew they were endangering their workers, but tried to smear those afflicted with diagnoses of syphilis. Katherine Drinker (Veanne Cox) and activist Wiley Stephens (Cara Seymour, “American Psycho”) are real. While the Cavallo sisters and American Radium are composites of actual people and one of the three businesses which allowed its female workers to become poisoned, the lawsuit which followed, Dr. Directed by "A Call to Spy's" Lydia Dean Pilcher along with Ginny Mohler, who also cowrote with Brittany Shaw, this semi-fictionalized account of 1920’s corporate malfeasance is a real MAGA movie, a testament to what happens when industries are unregulated and profits are prioritized over people.
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