![]() But despite the best efforts of the cast, particularly King and Quinn and a terrific Colby Minifie playing a grievously ill yet still spunky dial painter who joins the crusade, the stultifyingly literal script, co-written by Mohler and Brittany Shaw, unfolds to such a familiar rhythm that it becomes hard to invest in “Radium Girls” as anything more than an educational made-for-TV special. The story is enraging, and should hit home hard today for its combination of corporate malfeasance, high-level corruption and bribery, and the absolutely subhuman treatment of these young women as expendable worker bees to be summarily silenced when they outlast their usefulness to the suffocatingly male establishment. Their fears are confirmed when the exhumation of Mary’s body reveals massive levels of radioactivity in her remains and when Jo, who has started to lose teeth as her jaw turns necrotic, is given just two years to live. ![]() It’s duly provided by the doctor Bessie finds through her new photographer boyfriend Walt’s (Collin Kelly-Sordelet) Communist Party connections to local labor league leader Wiley (Cara Seymour). ![]() But Jo is a virgin and knows she cannot be syphilitic, so Bessie, transforming seemingly overnight from callow wannabe actress with stars in her eyes to impassioned social activist with fire in her belly, insists on a second opinion. ![]() The company provides her with a clearly duplicitous doctor, who diagnoses her with syphilis, a conveniently taboo disease of which their dial-painter sister Mary also allegedly died. ![]()
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