She turns out many more dials per day, because like the other workers at American Radium, she licks her brush to keep its point fine enough to paint the glow-in-the-dark numbers onto the watch faces. Older sister Josephine (Quinn) is the smart one, and the industrious one. But the leads, playing sisters employed at the factory, make us care and break our hearts in this classic tale of Big Business lowballing the value of human life and sacrificing worker safety in the process.īess (King) is a 17 year-old who dreams of silent screen fame, like her idol, Rudolph Valentino. Reminding people of the Radium Girls‘ sacrifice and struggle at a time when worker rights and worker safety are under open assault is a gutsy move and does a great credit to King and co-star Abby Quinn (“Little Women,” TV’s new “Mad About You”).įilmmakers Lydia Dean Pilcher, Ginnhy Mohler and (co-writer) Brittany Shaw tell a compelling, old-fashioned story in a somewhat stolid (corny, even) style. In the mid-1920s, they realized they were being poisoned, painting luminous radioactive numbers on watchfaces, and took the callous corporation to court, exposing a cover-up that changed American labor and workplace safety. Radium Corp’s New Jersey watch-dial factory. It’s a well-acted, smartly-reported and heartfelt if somewhat malnourished period piece about the heroic women of U.S. Joey King, who used her newly emerging star clout (“Fargo,” “Kissing Booth,” “Slender Man,” “Summer ’03”) to get “Radium Girls” on the screen.

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