Nigel Cole (2010)
The sewing machinists who went on strike at Ford’s in Dagenham in the summer of 1968 are a part of political history. These women gave considerable impetus to the move towards equal pay legislation. But I was dreading this dramatisation of their campaign, which is being promoted as the latest in a tradition of socially conscious feelgood British pictures. The film’s structure is predictable and the direction unimaginative – an extraordinary story is made to seem generic, to derive not from actual and particular events but from a movie formula originally associated with Ealing Studios and popular in a debased form in films like The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Calendar Girls (also directed by Nigel Cole) and, most recently, The Boat That Rocked. The motor of these pictures is the team spirit of a motley collection of canny underdogs which thwarts establishment forces of some kind. I found myself getting impatient halfway through: you know it’s a matter of the filmmakers working their way through an agenda of standard scenes and crises. Yet I enjoyed Made in Dagenham much more than I expected, thanks to some of the actors.
The surprising, unassuming leader of the machinists is a thirtyish housewife called Rita O’Grady, whose husband Eddie also works at Ford’s. Rita steps in at the encouragement of Albert, a union man who is also the women’s mentor, largely because the energies of Connie, the long-serving shop steward, are devoted to her ailing husband. (Rita O’Grady wasn’t a real person and I assume that all the characters in Billy Ivory’s screenplay, except for the politicians involved, are inventions.) It was obvious from Happy-Go-Lucky that Sally Hawkins was capable of more depth and variety than the character of Poppy – or, at least, the way Mike Leigh encouraged Hawkins to play Poppy – allowed her to show. She proves it here as Rita. When the machinists are eventually summoned to a meeting with Barbara Castle, the Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity, Rita asks Lisa, a middle-class woman who teaches at Rita’s son’s school, if she can borrow the red dress from Biba that Rita so admired when the pair first met[1]. (It makes no sense since Rosamund Pike, who plays Lisa, is much taller than Sally Hawkins, but let that pass. The costume enables an amusing exchange between Rita and Barbara Castle as they prepare to face the cameras and Mrs Castle explains that she favours C&A.) This is the dress Hawkins is wearing on the posters for Made in Dagenham, where she looks too soignée. But that isn’t a problem in the film itself. Her careworn prettiness is just right for Rita and she gives the character a lovely blend of strength and fragility, of diffidence and determination. Her looks and her line readings are true, often funny, and delicately expressive. We sense from Hawkins that Rita never quite believes it’s possible that she’s doing what she’s doing, yet she’s credibly driven too.
The growing tensions between Rita and Eddie are obviously constructed but Ivory has written some good dialogue for these scenes between the couple and Hawkins is very well partnered by Daniel Mays, who plays Eddie empathetically and, although the odds are stacked against him, makes him individual. It’s disappointing that, having created a convincing family life for the O’Gradys, Cole and Ivory do very little to show the effects of Rita’s political activity on her children – and it’s frustrating that Sally Hawkins is denied the opportunity to show what this means to Rita. Her speech at the TUC conference at Eastbourne doesn’t work. What she says is far too personal and intimate – an audience of senior TUC men of the 1960s would more likely have been embarrassed than spellbound. Cole virtually admits his mistake by cutting away from the conference hall so that we don’t see the delegates applauding: we know only that they vote to support the Dagenham women’s action. (This whole episode is presumably a fiction: the strike was over by the time of the political conference season of 1968.)
After an uncertain start, Miranda Richardson is enjoyable as Barbara Castle. Once she’s got through a particularly stupid sequence of bawling out her inept officials in Whitehall (the wicked queen in pantomime turning on her acolytes), Richardson seems to relax and start enjoying herself. That chimes with one’s memories of the public persona of Barbara Castle. Richardson is too po-faced at first; Castle often used a smile to turn the knife. Although it’s a wretched role, Rosamund Pike is charming as Lisa – she’s a lovely, witty, emotionally fluid presence. There are actors too in Made in Dagenham whom I usually find over-deliberate but who give strong, likeable performances here – Geraldine James as Connie, Bob Hoskins as Albert. It comes as no surprise that Kenneth Cranham is effective as a leathery, rulebound union official who’s as anxious as the bosses to maintain the status quo.
Made in Dagenham is so dramatically clichéd that a threatened departure from the clichés is disorienting. Connie’s husband George (Roger Lloyd Pack) is having a nervous breakdown and on the edge of violence. You think he might hit his wife as she prepares to go out to a political meeting but he’s calm and their parting words to each other are conclusively affectionate: you know from this exchange that Connie will never again see her husband alive. Cut to Connie, walking along, chatting happily with Rita: for a moment, I thought this was happening next day and that I was wrong: it was almost a relief when I realised it was later on the same evening and Connie is returning home, to find that George has hanged himself. The film’s conclusion is surprisingly perfunctory, almost careless. Because the goodies and baddies are crudely conceived, it’s something of a relief to avoid a rundown of how everyone ends up but the way the Bob Hoskins character is dropped is frustrating. Albert’s commitment to sexual equality in the workplace – the legacy of watching his mother work hard and earn little as she kept the family together – is so striking in a man of his class and time that his disappearance from the conclusion is a real omission.
You notice from the news film which accompanies the closing credits that the actual Dagenham women were an older group than their movie counterparts. This is an odd reshaping of the facts. It doesn’t only obscure the social truth of the situation; the filmmakers also deprive themselves of the chance to create some easily distinct roles and make use of middle-aged character actresses. Instead, younger performers are asked to do parts that seem to be cut from the same cloth: Andrea Riseborough, for example, plays the cheerfully profane Brenda perfectly well but the character is so thinly written that she makes little impression. Interspersed with the archive footage are snatches of interviews with the Dagenham women as they are now. These women must have been young in 1968 but there’s no suggestion that they led the campaign. (Nigel Cole uses news film well at both ends of the picture: there are inserts from an information film at the start which neatly supply the facts about the Ford operation in Britain at the time.)
Billy Ivory’s script barely hints at tensions among the women as the going gets tough. When Connie’s husband commits suicide his widow has one of those obligatory, rarely believable home-truths-telling outbursts at the funeral but her anger with Rita hasn’t that much to do with the industrial action. Only Sandra (Jaime Winstone), the blonde dolly bird who thinks that press attention to the walkout could be her passport to a modelling contract, complains about the measly strike pay in her wage packet and verges on betrayal of the others. (Jaime Winston’s brassiness is rather affecting: her features have a coarseness that emphasises the distance between Sandra and Twiggy, whom she dreams of emulating.) Cole and Ivory don’t treat Lisa much better than her chauvinist husband does: the character is on the receiving end of the most weakly contrived bit of plotting in Made in Dagenham. It turns out that Lisa is married to one of the Ford bosses (Rupert Graves, who seems ready at first to avoid caricature but quite soon has to fall back on it). Lisa organises her own campaign to get one of the teaching staff – a corporal punisher (Andrew Lincoln – he has one scene only but that’s enough) – removed. Lisa tells Rita that she’s a Cambridge graduate, trapped in a humiliating marriage: she want to see the machinists’ fight succeed. Of course you can see the points that Cole and Ivory are making but they don’t add up. It would be easy enough to accept this if Lisa was a purely decorative wife – but why would a beautiful, clever young woman like her, in the late 1960s, feel she was trapped in a marriage (especially since she’s self-confident enough to make waves by righting wrongs at the school)?
The men in the movie are mostly contemptible – and mostly cartoons, without the liveliness that might redeem the crudeness. It’s just embarrassing to watch the actors playing Barbara Castle’s civil servants or to hear an American voice (did I see Danny Glover’s name on the credits?) yelling expletives down the phone from headquarters across the Atlantic, although Richard Schiff does respectably as the Ford company’s envoy to London. John Sessions’s Harold Wilson is improbably complacent (like him or not, Wilson was too paranoid for that) – presumably for the sake of presenting him as condescending towards the star woman in his cabinet and as in thrall to Ford’s economic muscle.
The film, photographed by John de Borman, looks hideous – and the cramped, toneless visuals don’t amount to any kind of style or social commentary: they’re the same in all settings. There’s the usual chronological precision (the action starts on a specific date in 1968) followed by carelessness: the television in Rita’s home is showing the anti-Vietnam War demonstration in Grosvenor Square which didn’t happen until the autumn of the same year. The pop soundtrack is agreeable but the choice of songs is too obvious (‘The Israelites’ as the women cycle to work over the opening titles, ‘You Can Get It If You Really Want’ at the business end of proceedings). One of the two women who came out of the theatre just ahead of me was deriding, bitterly and not unreasonably, the implication of Made in Dagenham that the Ford machinists sealed the equal pay deal for British women. But, as the closing legends tell us, the Equal Pay Act did complete its passage through parliament in May 1970 – just a few weeks before the Wilson government left office. (This was the same ‘failed’ government that also oversaw the abolition of capital punishment, the legalisation of abortion and homosexuality, and the creation of the OU.)
5 October 2010
[1] This note was written when I first saw the film in 2010. I don’t normally edit these notes on second thoughts or after another viewing but, as I discovered from watching Made in Dagenham a second time (on television), this is such a bad error that I have to admit it. Lisa isn’t a teacher but the mother of another boy in the school. (It appears to be a fee-paying school with a few scholarship places for bright working-class kids, of whom Rita’s son is one.) Lisa got a first in history from Cambridge. Since the film presents her as frustrated by the uselessness of her life I’m not sure why I thought she was a secondary school teacher (which plenty of Cambridge graduates, male as well as female, were at the time).
