Video Review: Workers Win in Made in Dagenham

MADE IN DAGENHAM (2010)

Directed by Nigel Cole

113 mins.

* * *

Depressed by what happened in Wisconsin? Feeling sick by the nationwide union-bashing steamroller effect that’s flattening working people? Think there’s no hope? Maybe you could use a reminder that sometimes the bastards go too far and that common people do, on occasion, stand up for themselves. Let us recommend a modest British movie, Made in Dagenham. It’s now on DVD, about the only way to see it as it sped out of U.S. theaters faster than a Ford goes down the assembly line. Like a lot of “small” films, this one’s meager budget isn’t hard to spot, but watch it one for inspiration, not path-breaking filmmaking.

Made in Dagenham is the British Norma Rae. Dagenham is a section of East London that was, until 2005, the site of a massive Ford assembly plant. In 1968, it was the site of an impromptu strike by 187 women sewing machine operators who were responsible for all of the upholstery that went inside Fords. That 187 women walked out in defiance of Ford U.K, the American parent firm, and their own union was remarkable enough. That they won was little short of miraculous, and a signal event in helping a working-class version of feminism take hold in England. Rita O’Grady, a married woman who simply got fed up with being ignored, spearheaded the strike. The women of Dagenham were abused by management, made the butt of sexist jokes by the thousands of male autoworkers, and were taken for granted by a union that insisted that men’s issues were more important. This film shows how the women of Dagenham turned everyone’s assumptions upside down.

O’Grady is played by Sally Hawkins with a deft and steely resolve. This comes as a surprise, because we last saw her in Happy-Go-Lucky playing a motor-mouthed ditz who flitted across the screen like a Republican fleeing a tax collector. We walked out of that film, as we found Hawkins’s performance so over-the-top and annoying that she could have been Jim Carrey in drag. Not in this film! Hawkins is a spark plug analogous to Sally Field in Norma Rae, and she is superb at walking the line between past and present. Her performance allows us to see the ways in which the 1960s belatedly but inexorably transformed working-class life. Bob Hoskins turns in a very credible performance as the one union official who believes that women need to be seen as comrades, not cupcakes. Another intriguing performance is that of Jaime Winstone (daughter of veteran actor Ray Winstone) as Sandra, a young woman torn between using her slutty sexuality to get ahead, or to decry her exploitation and castigate the sexist pigs that objectify her. Miranda Richardson gets to kick chauvinist keister as the first woman to hold the office of British Secretary of State.

This is an inspiring film, even if it is often heavy handed and predictable. The story is, essentially, David-versus-Goliath with David sporting a Ronettes’ hairstyle and wearing a gathered skirt. In like fashion, some of the characters are cartoon cutouts rather than recognizable people. For all of that, the film nicely captures the sense of a culture in transition. We also see that which so many men tried hard not to see. There could be no turning back; the page hadn’t turned, it had been ripped from its binder and burned.

So watch this film and remind yourself that some times the good gals win.

Postscript: The Dagenham Ford plant closed on 2005, not because of union problems, but because the sixty-year-old plant was no longer economically viable. Wind turbines are now made in Dagenham.