Four films about Jimmy Hoffa, the former president of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters whose 1975 disappearance is still unsolved, are included in a guide, published by Cornell University Press, to the 150 most noteworthy and significant films and documentaries about labor.

Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds, and Riffraff: An Organized Guide to Films about Labor was compiled by Tom Zaniello, professor of English at Northern Kentucky University and a visiting professor in the College Degree Program of the George Meany Center for Labor Studies in Silver Spring, Md.

Zaniello consulted with trade unionists and labor educators to compile a listing of films that, he said, “provide a well-rounded look at working-class life and people, labor issues, unions, power struggles and political movements related to labor issues.”

Perhaps no other labor leader’s life has attracted more Hollywood attention than that of Jimmy Hoffa. And with Hoffa’s son, James, now vying for the Teamster’s president’s post, interest in one of Big Labor’s prominent families is certain to remain strong.

“Clearly with the case of Jimmy Hoffa, there is a certain intrigue about him – his legal troubles and his disappearance – that makes his story ideal for the big screen,” Zaniello said.

In his list of notable labor films, the author includes the three feature films and an Arts and Entertainment Network documentary of Hoffa, produced in 1992, containing footage of Hoffa’s son.

The four Hoffa titles are:

•  “Blood Feud” (1983), starring Robert Blake as the Teamsters boss in a film centering on the long-time feud between Hoffa and Robert Kennedy. “There exists an extraordinary amount of negative information here about Hoffa, presented mostly from the government’s point of view,” Zaniello writes, noting that U.S. Attorney General Robert Kennedy had almost two dozen attorneys investigating Hoffa. “That they got Hoffa on so few of the things they said he masterminded is an enigma this film cannot answer. It certainly demonstrates how Hoffa seemed to crowd so much of the Kennedys’ other agendas – civil rights, for example – to the side.”
• “F.I.S.T.” (1978), starring Sylvester Stallone.  “A thinly disguised version of Jimmy Hoffa’s career in the Teamsters, the film argues that Big Labor is by its nature prone to violence, simply because it cannot police itself,” Zaniello notes. “The result is a film that makes yet another union look like it’s run by the Godfather.”
• “Hoffa” (1992), with Jack Nicholson. “‘Hoffa’ was the third in an ambitious series of Hollywood revisionist epics about the 1960s that attempted to do for organized labor what Oliver Stone’s ‘JFK’ did for the Kennedy assassination and Spike Lee’s ‘Malcolm X’ did for the history of black militancy,” Zaniello writes. “All three share the virtue (or the vice) of focusing on a controversial figure whose biography (or at least some of its major facts) remains uncertain.  All three films were greeted with mixed critical and popular receptions, primarily because they didn’t get the facts right.”
• “Hoffa: The True Story” (1992).  Using archival, news and “home-movie” footage, including one of Hoffa’s last interviews, which was recorded at Cornell’s School of Industrial and Labor Relations six months before he disappeared, the documentary discusses the Teamsters in a “mostly positive way,” Zaniello said. “The film is therefore a must-see to balance some of the more hysterical anti-Hoffa sentiment in American popular culture.”
• But Zaniello’s list proves there is more to labor history than Hoffa’s story, no matter how often it is told.  His list goes beyond those titles most often cited in this genre – On the Waterfront, Harlan County U.S.A.  and Norma Rae – by offering up important but less commercially successful films with issues and subject matter not usually explored by Hollywood.

Such examples are:

• “Fast Food Women” (1992), a 28-minute documentary that dispels the myth that fast-food workers are teens earning sneaker money. The film interviews older women in Eastern Kentucky who are the sole breadwinners in their families. “‘Fast Food Women’ is a political statement about fast-food restaurants everywhere and the exploitation of part-time labor nationally and internationally,” Zaniello said.
• “At the River I Stand, the Memphis Strike” 1993, a 56-minute documentary about the 1968 strike of 1,300 sanitation workers in Memphis.  “The film is a persuasive and moving argument for the position that the Memphis sanitation strike was the culmination of the Civil Rights Movement in the South,” Zaniello writes. The strike was what brought the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. to Memphis, where he was assassinated.
• “In that King’s assassination was a tragic part of the strike, the assassination also changed the strike’s status from a local struggle to one of national significance,” he said.

Each entry contains film credits, cast list, film synopsis and an explanation of the issues presented. Zaniello also provides suggested titles for further reading as well as an indication of each film’s availability.