The English film Made in Dagenham, playing through next Thursday, Feb. 24, at the Nickelodeon Theater in Columbia, tells a story that likely isn’t well known in America, but should be: the 1968 strike by a small group of women against the Ford Motor plant in Dagenham, England, which brought about the Equal Pay Act of 1970 in the U.K., and opened the flood-gates for similar measures in countries around the world.
Under the direction of Nigel Cole, it’s a worthy if familiar history lesson: an inspiring, audience-pleasing, somewhat pandering tale of ordinary women rising up against evil corporate swine. Despite the fact that it’s one of those British working class films where you find yourself yearning for subtitles, it’s pretty enjoyable and even thrilling, thanks in no small part to a solid lead performance by Sally Hawkins and the ever-reliable support of Bob Hoskins and Miranda Richardson.
Working very much from the template of other movies where women stand up to the Man, like Norma Rae and North Country, William Ivory’s script finds it’s heart in the story of an unlikely troublemaker: Rita O’Grady, played by Hawkins, a hard-working wife and mother who finds herself elected as the voice of peers and the conscience of her industry
As presented in the movie, the larger issue of equal pay starts with another matter. The 187 women at Dagenham, most of whom work as seamstresses, are graded as “unskilled labor,” which means less pay than men doing similar work. Also, the men aren’t relegated to working in a crumbling sweatshop where it’s so hot they have to work in their underwear. (In press reports at the time of the film’s release, women who actually worked at Dagenham denied this aspect of the story.)
Under the leadership of labor boss Albert Passingham (Hoskins), the women first go on strike to raise their status to at least to the level of semi-skilled. After a meeting with the stuffed shirts at Ford, the stakes get higher. Rita, a quiet type, suddenly finds both the voice to speak up and the Erin Brockovich dramatics to go with it: by tossing a handful of leather pieces at Ford’s UK boss (Rupert Graves) and telling him that if her work is so unskilled, let’s see him do it.
The battle, soon enough, is on, not just for a status upgrade, but for equal pay. With Rita as the leader, the women initiate a strike that brings the plant to its knees: cars are stuck on the assembly line with no seats to go in them, the plant shuts down, and thousands of men are thrown out of work.
On the domestic front, the screws tighten among the women and their families. The shop steward (Geraldine James) finds herself torn between devoting herself to the strike and caring for her husband, a veteran still bearing war-inflicted psychic scars. A cute young woman (Jamie Winstone, daughter of the actor Ray from Sexy Beast and The Departed) is lured away from the cause by Ford money, with the promise of a modeling career. Rita’s marriage is strained to the breaking point as money runs out, her refrigerator is repossessed, and her husband Eddie (Daniel Mays) gets heat from the guys at the pub to tell his loud-mouthed wife to put a sock in it already. On the positive side, Rita finds an unlikely ally in the UK boss’s young trophy wife (Rosamunde Pike), a well-educated lady with a mind of her own.
The strike hits home elsewhere, such as Ford headquarters in Dearborn, Michigan, where equal pay is regarded as bad business. Fearing a domino effect -- what if all women, everywhere, at all their plants, want equal pay? – corporate execs play hardball. Henry Ford II leans on Prime Minister Harold Wilson (John Sessions), who is already dealing with labor strikes nationwide. Wilson leans on Barbara Castle (Miranda Richardson), Secretary of State for Employment and Productivity. Ford sends over a high-ranking corporate goon, who pressures Hoskins’ spineless union cohort Monty (Kenneth Cranham) to break the strike.
Hawkins isn’t the live wire here that she was in her Oscar-nominated role in Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky; Rita’s another kind of free spirit, a workaday mom who is sensitized to class differences first in seeing the way her son is treated at school by a cruel teacher, and then by realizing her own exploitation in the work-place. She’s the epitome of plucky, and brings a credible amount of brio to the role.
Hoskins does his usual, agreeable ball-of-energy thing, and Richardson, well-cast as a career politician torn between compromise and her natural sympathies toward women who only want a fair shake, gets her share of scenes that put her commanding presence on full display.
As a period piece, it gets the late-60s style right -- Jackie O and Twiggy are still the fashion icons -- and it's scored with just the kind of Top 40 one-hit wonders that were pouring from the car radios and spinning at dance parties: "Israelites," "Wooly Bully," and "Green Tambourine," among others. As a tale of triumph against adversity, it doesn’t always skip the clichés. While Rita devotes herself to the struggle, leaving the home to the charge of husband, we get a standard succession of men-can’t do-anything-right scenes: poor Eddie lazes around on the couch, can’t dress the kids properly for school and even burns the dinner, scalding his hand in the process – a scene I thought had been retired forever.
It’s also the kind of movie that plays to the audience’s automatic sympathies, and the woman in front of me at the theater didn’t mind: she couldn’t stop nodding her head or talking back to the screen, audibly agreeing with all the righteous dialogue, and seemed about ready to climb into the screen so that she too could hold up an “Equal Pay for Equal Work” sign.
Formulaic but also juicy and moving, it pushes buttons in all the right places.
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