A powerful look at an incendiary moment in American history, The Killing Floor takes on civil rights, labor relations, and the black experience in Chicago during and after World War I as thousands of African-Americans left the Deep South for better jobs and wages in the North.
The film, based on real events, is built around the story of Frank Custer (played by Damien Leake), a Mississippi sharecropper who found work in the Chicago stockyards. As he works his way up from the slaughterhouse (the killing floor of the title) to better-paying work as a butcher, he brings his wife (Alfre Woodard) and kids to Chicago and gets involved in the effort to integrate the previously white union and sign up skeptical African-American workers.
Building the story around Custer helps the audience navigate the complicated social and economic issues at work here as Washington sends in a federal judge to mediate labor relations and stop any potential strike during the war. When the war ends and soldiers return home to reclaim their jobs, the meat-packing companies stir up racial divisions to break the union influence, which culminates in the 1919 race riots. Custer was a real-life figure, as are many of the characters featured in this historical drama, including union activist Bill Bremer (Clarence Felder), a white man trying to overcome the racial divisions in the workplace, and anti-union agitator "Heavy" Williams (Moses Gunn).
While this is technically a TV movie, produced for the PBS showcase American Playhouse, the film played at the Cannes and Locarno film festivals and won a prize in an early incarnation of the Sundance Film Festival. Actor Bill Gunn made his feature directing debut (after numerous helming numerous episodes of episodic TV) with the film, which he shot on location in Chicago on 16mm film, and he gives it a rich, dense quality more like an independent feature than a TV movie of the 1980s. He brings a vast array of characters to life and shows both the racism faced by the blacks and the animosity many African-American workers felt for the white union organizers, while also revealing the more nuanced attitudes and morals of the individuals involved.
It is a moving and effective drama and a powerful history lesson. Features racial epithets but no explicit imagery or language. The Killing Floor was restored and revived in 2020 just as the pandemic closed theaters and was streamed as a Virtual Cinema event. It comes to DVD and Blu-ray in editions filled with supplements.
There is a video introduction by director Bill Duke, a Q&A with actor Damien Leake and writer/producer Elsa Rassbach, the 14-minute featurette "The Making of The Killing Floor: Pandemic Era Conversations" with actors Leake and Clarence Felder, director Duke, and producer Rassbach (recorded over Zoom), an interview with Rassbach, and a booklet with two essays. Highly recommended.