Made in Dagenham **** (2010, Sally Hawkins, Bob Hoskins, Andrea Riseborough, Miranda Richardson, Geraldine James, Rosamund Pike, Daniel Mays, Kenneth Cranham) – Classic Movie Review 3313

‘Everyone out!’ That’s the cry in the East London suburbs in 1968, a cry you don’t hear very much these days! Sally Hawkins (Golden Globe winner for 2008’s Happy-Go-Lucky) gives a fiery, attractive turn as fast-talking, no-nonsense young mum Rita O’Grady, who leads the female workers – 187 sewing machinists – at the Ford Dagenham car plant out on strike in protest against sexual discrimination.

Working in poor conditions for long hours and rubbish pay, the women finally lay down their tools when they are reclassified as ‘unskilled’. Director Nigel Cole and writer Billy Ivory’s entertaining and instructive dramatisation of this rather uneasy story shows the flipside the Swinging London of the era, where skilled women are not paid properly, just because big business could get away with it and governments had done little for fairness and equality.

If the film has problems, they lie in the difficulty of making a serious, borderline boring subject into a popular entertainment. This prompts some broad comedy and a gallery of caricatured heroes and villains as the everyday Londoners (all of them cheery and with hearts of gold) line up against wicked management (ineffectual if British, slimy and appalling if American) and greedy or prejudiced male union officials.

This also prompts Miranda Richardson’s and John Sessions’s broad caricature turns as Employment Secretary Barbara Castle and Prime Minister Harold Wilson. Although, to be fair, they may be spoofy, but there are also enjoyable.  On the other hand, a stellar cast of British Equity’s finest – Bob Hoskins, Geraldine James, Rosamund Pike, Daniel Mays, Kenneth Cranham, Roger Lloyd Pack, Jaime Winstone, Lorraine Stanley, Nicola Duffett, Rupert Graves and Andrea Riseborough among them – do a jolly good job of fleshing out some under-written characters, making them seem ‘real’ and magnetic.

The film perhaps doesn’t have quite the same appeal as the same team’s Calendar Girls (2003), because, well, strikes just aren’t sexy. But it is a brave, intelligent and honourable attempt to bring an issue-led and character-driven drama to the popular screen, so it deserves much respect and a large audience.

Despite the strike’s controversy and unpopularity in some quarters, the women and the strike made a difference – it led to the Equal Pay Act a couple of years later.

It was a hit – and a popular London West End musical version followed in 2014, with Gemma Arterton.

Sandie Shaw, who sings the title song, work as a punched-card operator in the Ford plant at Dagenham. Hawkins’s grandmother worked as a seamstress.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3313

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