The workers, in their teens and twenties, are given a tiny paint brush and a vial of Undark, a glow-in-the-dark paint made with radium, and encouraged to lick the brush in between each swipe to make their movements more precise. Leech ( Scott Shepherd), Josephine and Bessie paint the numbers on watch dials. Butkiss (Carol Cadby) and distant factory manager Mr. Alongside dozens of other women cramped together in the same room, overseen by stern team leader Mrs. “Radium Girls” transports us to that time: In Orange, New Jersey, in 1925, sisters Josephine ( Abby Quinn) and Bessie ( Joey King) work for the company American Radium (standing in for the real United States Radium Corporation, which operated from 1914 to 1970). Before the determination of their toxicity, though, these items were part of a bona fide craze, and provided valuable factory jobs to women increasingly joining the work force after the devastation of World War I. Marjane Satrapi’s biopic of Curie, “ Radioactive,” portrayed the scientist’s guilt later in life after countless workers around the world became sick from producing products laced with radium: nail polish, chocolate, face cream, toothpaste. In the early 20th century, the discovery of radium and polonium by Marie Curie led to a boom in commercial products that boasted of radioactivity as a phenomenon that was invigorating for the human body.
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