New York’s garment industry was the main entry point for countless unskilled Jewish and (to a lesser degree) Italian immigrants a century ago.
Over the next few decades, unions played a major role in increasing the wages of tens of thousands in the garment industry, from cutters to seamstresses to tailors. Those workers became part of the American middle class and could afford to send their children to college — opening the door for an entire generation of Jewish professionals.
All of this represents an important chapter in American Jewish history, and the most interesting aspect of “Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags,” an energetic, though superficial, documentary by veteran New York filmmaker Marc Levin (“Protocols of Zion”).
“Schmatta” premieres Monday, Oct. 19 at 9 p.m. on HBO, with numerous repeats.
Levin is interested in the early days as well as the heyday of the garment district in midtown Manhattan, but he’s plainly galvanized by the current economic crisis.
He blames the massive outsourcing of clothing-industry jobs to Asia over the last 25 years as a reason why the recession is stinging so many Americans so hard. And he goes even further, suggesting that the widespread corporate craving for short-term profits is the main culprit for the crippled economy.
Levin edges into Michael Moore territory here, although there are more Yiddishisms in “Schmatta” than in “Capitalism: A Love Story.” Whether one agrees or disagrees with the film’s thesis, though, it strikes me as redundant — we’re all pretty aware of the current state of things — and a misallocation of time better spent detailing the garment industry’s central role in New York life in the middle of the 20th century.
But “Schmatta” wants to cover the loading dock to the boardroom in its brisk 74 minutes, and is less than deft at weaving together all the threads. At various points it plays like a gritty social history, a chilly business story, a trends piece and a pop-culture nostalgia trip (with its cheap-shot glimpses of fashion excesses from the ‘60s onward).
We do hear briefly about David Dubinsky, who headed the International Ladies Garment Workers Union from 1932 to 1966. His power was such that he made the cover of Time, gave orders to senators and organized and hosted an enormous rally on Seventh Avenue in 1960 for presidential candidate John F. Kennedy.
But the part about Dubinsky is the exception, for “Schmatta” is not a carefully organized explication of key players and events but a shallow oral history whose distinguishing characteristic is an ear for the amusing but trivial anecdote.
Worse, the editing of the handful of firsthand witnesses over the course of the film ultimately distills them into a simplistic labor vs. capital dialectic.
As one might expect, the catastrophic Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire of 1911, which claimed the lives of 146 young women, is mentioned early on. We can only imagine the grieving on the Lower East Side, even as the tragedy became a rallying call for workplace safety, government regulation and union organizing.
Much later, Levin makes pointed mention of a similar 2000 fire in a sportswear factory in Bangladesh in which 51 young women and children died. We may kvell at the filmmaker’s Jewish sense of social justice, but we must also acknowledge the aggressively successful Jewish apparel executive that acknowledges maintaining his profit margins by contracting with Third World factories.
A fast-paced overview with an up-to-the-minute feel, “Schmatta” stands as a snapshot of an industry — and a country—where, as one interviewee puts it, “Nobody wants to manufacture, everybody wants to broker.” Doesn’t leave much room for a sequel, does it?
“Schmatta: Rags to Riches to Rags” premieres 9 p.m. Monday, Oct. 19 on HBO.