The Killing Floor

press release: USA | 1985 | DCP | 118 min.

Director: Bill Duke

Cast: Damien Leake, Alfre Woodard, Dennis Farina

Rich in characters and played against a canvas red with the blood of the Chicago Race Riot of 1919, this critically acclaimed independent film tells a true story of how a group of black and white slaughterhouse workers attempted to break race barriers to build an interracial union for the first time in the brutal Chicago Stockyards. Leake stars as Frank Custer, a young black sharecropper from Mississippi—one of tens of thousands of southern blacks who journeyed to the industrial north during World War One, hoping for more racial equality. When he lands a job as a laborer on “the killing floor” of a giant Chicago meatpacking plant, he finds a place seething with racial antagonism. White immigrant workers are determined to improve their bargaining power by bringing the new black migrants into the union for the first time, but many blacks resist, having had bitter experience with whites. When Frank decides to support the union, his best friends from the South turn against him. Preserved by UCLA Film & Television Archive as part of the Sundance Institute Collection from a 16mm safety color original picture negative and a mono 16mm safety audio mag track MTI Nova Restoration, laboratory services and DCP by UCLA Film & Television Archive Digital Media Lab. Special thanks to Elsa Rassbach, Sundance Institute Collection at UCLA Film & Television Archive.

UCLA Festival of Preservation on Tour: One of the world’s leaders in the efforts to preserve our motion picture heritage, the UCLA Film & Television Archive has arranged their biennial tour of restored 35mm prints and DCPs of selected titles from the most recent edition of their annual Festival of Preservation. The selection highlights features and shorts including silent-era rediscoveries, landmark American Independent movies, poverty row gems, remarkable documentaries, and more! The screenings will be presented both at our regular Vilas Hall venue and every Sunday in February at the Chazen Museum of Art.