EDITOR’S NOTE: The $5.20 an Hour Dream was on the CBS Late Movie on May 11 and August 22, 1983; May 17 and December 26, 1984 and March 28, 1985.
This is a gritty, ripped-from-the-headlines socio-economic morality play disguised as primetime entertainment, taking a hard look at inflation, blue-collar survival, and the entrenched boys’ club of factory labor.
Directed by TV veteran Russ Mayberry (Unidentified Flying Oddball, Fer-de-Lance) and written by Robert E. Thompson (who earned a Writer’s Guild of America Award nomination for his trouble; he also wrote They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), this stars Linda Lavin, best known to the masses as Alice, but here shedding the sitcom canned laughter for some genuine grit. She plays Ellen Lissick, a newly divorced mother living in Oregon City who finds herself in a financial vice grip. With an ex-husband (Nicholas Pryor) who’s of little help and a young daughter (Dana Hill) counting on her, Ellen needs cash, and she needs it fast.
The solution? Step off the traditional pink-collar path and onto the all-male assembly line at the local engine company where she already clocks in. What follows is textnook ’80s institutional friction. Ellen isn’t just fighting broken transmissions and heavy machinery; she’s fighting a wall of hostile male coworkers and supervisors who treat the shop floor like a sacred fraternity. Richard Jaeckel brings that trademark rugged, gravelly presence as Albert Kleinschmidt, leading the old-guard resistance, while a phenomenal character-actor supporting roster—including Robert Davi, Dennis Fimple, Burton Gilliam, Ernie Hudson and Timothy Scott—populates the floor with enough genuine texture to make you smell the grease and burnt coffee.
Credit where it’s due: Lavin carries the entire picture with an anchor-weight performance. She doesn’t play Ellen as an untouchable superhero of the feminist movement; she plays her as an exhausted, desperate woman who simply refuses to be priced out of her own life. When she finally knuckles down to tackle the brutal qualifying test to earn her rightful promotion, it hits with the kind of earned triumph that modern prestige television often forgets how to script.
The $5.20 an Hour Dream might talk about a wage that sounds like pocket change by today’s standards, but the fight for respect on the floor remains timeless. In fact, $5.20 an hour would be $21.14, nearly three times the minimum wage.
You can watch this on the official Linda Lavin YouTube page.
