Fighting the good fight isn't always a function of war movies. Consider "A Civil Action," which is scheduled for video release July 13.
The story has a show-me-the-money lawyer (John Travolta) who finds a conscience when he takes a case involving heartless corporations, a polluted river and at least a dozen kids dead from leukemia.Here are some other "crusader" movies that might interest you. Just remember: Justice may ultimately be served, but happy endings don't usually come with the territory.
-- "The China Syndrome" (1979): Best known as the movie that benefited from some amazing reel-to-real timing. Less than two weeks after this film about an attempted cover-up of an accident at a nuclear power plant was released, Three Mile Island made "meltdown" part of our everyday vocabulary.
Jane Fonda plays the ambitious reporter who stumbles onto The Big Story; Michael Douglas, who co-produced, is her radical (read, long-haired) cameraman; and Jack Lemmon is the company man caught between his conscience and his career. The arcane title, incidentally, refers to the belief that, if the core of a nuclear reactor did melt, it would go right through the earth to the other side of the world, i.e., China.
-- "Silkwood" (1983): In 1974, Karen Silkwood, an employee of a nuclear processing plant, was mysteriously killed in a car accident while on her way to talk to a reporter about safety violations at the plant.
But this is not a movie about a death; it's a movie about a life, a celebration of a working-class heroine who, when we meet her, doesn't care about having her consciousness raised.
Meryl Streep is at her considerable best as Karen; Kurt Russell plays her boyfriend; and Cher snagged her first Oscar nomination for her role as Streep's scruffy, sad-sack roomie. Interestingly, Jane Fonda had been trying to get the rights to the Silkwood saga for years; she gave up just about the time "The China Syndrome" came along.
-- "Matewan" (1987): Just about anything John Sayles does has an element of social consciousness (if you don't count his early scripts for "Piranha" and "The Howling"). Here, he dramatizes the ugly war that took place in West Virginia in 1920, when coal miners rebelled against unspeakable working conditions.
Chris Cooper -- you saw him in Sayles' "Lone Star" -- is the union organizer, a passionate supporter of workers' rights but also a pacifist; David Strathairn -- you saw him as the sleazy rich guy in "L.A. Confidential" -- is the decent, caught-in-the-middle sheriff; and James Earl Jones is one of the scabs imported by the bosses who reconsiders which side he's on.
-- "Marie" (1985): Sissy Spacek was on location in Nashville filming "Coal Miner's Daughter" when she heard about Marie Ragghianti. A single mother who had worked her way through school and become the first woman to head the Tennessee Board of Pardons and Paroles, she was abruptly fired by Gov. Ray Blanton for allegedly "not doing her job." She took him to court, contending that the "job" she wasn't doing was to turn a blind eye to a thoroughly corrupt system.
Spacek's committed performance is stronger than the film as a whole, but it has its moments. Jeff Daniels is convincingly loathsome as Marie's boss, a slick politico, and Fred Thompson, her real-life lawyer (and now U.S. senator from Tennessee), plays himself in the movie.
-- "The Big One" (1998): Michael Moore ("Roger & Me" and the current cable series, "The Awful Truth"), professional gadfly and agent provocateur, is back to bug the fat cats and corporate giants. He uses his book tour for "Downsize This!" to make a dark but hilarious documentary about the unceasing greed and venality of corporate America.
Moore finds (seeks?) the same phenomenon in almost every city he visits. Namely, profits are up; so are layoffs and factory closings. Moore takes on everyone from Payday to Pillsbury, but the piece de resistance is a close encounter with Nike Chief Executive Officer Phil Knight.
Moore may be all for fair play in the workplace, but that doesn't mean he plays fair. He arrives at Knight's plush office with a ticket to Indonesia, so the exec can visit the 14-year-olds who make his shoes.