Who actually banned this movie?

Well I think you've found the irony of the red scare. While everyone was frantic about a vast communist conspiracy, there was a quite visible vast right-wing conspiracy suppressing this type of expression. AFAIK, it was never banned, but an agreement involving bargaining and armtwisting with many different organizations and stakeholders including the motion picture industry, congress, the fbi, and even other unions. It did have a premier. Apparently 12 theaters showed it. Blacklisting didn't always mean ban, it just meant the vast right-wing conspiracy would insure the actor/director/writer couldn't get work.

Normally there was no difference between blacklisting and banning, but Salt of the Earth was the exception in more than one way. You'll notice that a couple of the professional actors' last film before SotE was in 1951, presumably when they were blacklisted. Rosaura Revueltas and Will Geer are the only ones(correct me if wrong) that appeared in later productions after the blacklisting, but of course none during. During this time Will Geer also set up a theater company for blacklisted actors. This is what sets SotE apart from other films that were banned. Most of the others were controversial or pushing the limits of social norms and ended up banned as a result, but the very making of SotE was an act of resistance. SotE could have been 5 minutes of Will Geer and the others having a chat about the Dodgers over a cup of coffee and it still would have been a culturally and politically significant film. A lot of powerful people tried to shut them up, but they made a movie anyway. Sure no one saw it when it was released, but because of the huge effort to destroy it everyone knew the film, the people that made it, and their ideas remained.


The New York Times has a review of the opening from 1954 on its website. Search for Salt of the Earth on rottentomatoes.com and you can find it. There's also a recent review on the NYT website.