Carry on striking in Made in Dagenham

10 April 2012

Do you think equal pay for men and women is right? You do? Good for you. In that case, Made in Dagenham isn’t going to present you with the least little hint of any moral dilemma. You’re on for a great big jolly. A feelgood parade. Carry On Striking, in fact.

In 1968, the Ford plant in the grimmest part of industrial Essex employed 55,000 people, very few of them female. But in a run-down annexe, 187 women toiled away at sewing machines, making car seats for Cortinas and Zephyrs. When their work was down-graded from "semi-skilled" to "unskilled", they went on strike — and escalated the campaign to an attack on the unfairness of being paid less than men for the same work (15 per cent less at Dagenham, although watching the film carelessly might lead you to think it was 50 per cent).

The new Secretary for State for Employment and Productivity, Barbara Castle, got involved and the strike was settled with the women accepting a pay rate worth 92 per cent of that of the men. The re-grading the Dagenham machinists wanted didn’t happen — but the strike contributed indirectly to the passing of the Equal Pay Act in 1970.

It wasn’t the most important battle for sex equality and it had been largely forgotten when, in 2003, Sue McGregor brought together some of the women involved for an edition of her excellent Radio 4 programme, The Reunion. Producer Stephen Woolley and screenwriter William Ivory heard it and thought there was a film to be made about the story, originally planning to call it "We Want Sex", which is how one of the women’s banners, captured in a famous picture accidentally half- unfurled, had read.

Made in Dagenham significantly re-casts the events by amalgamating several of the strike leaders into one fictitious heroine, Rita O’Grady, played by Sally Hawkins, most famous as the bubbly Poppy in Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky but soon to be seen in almost everything.

The film is so centred around her that it stands or falls on her appeal — and Hawkins, so fragile and thin that, despite being in her mid-thirties, she seems not just girly but childlike, is tremendously skippy and vivacious throughout, again, an effect you find captivating or not. Some it brings out in hives, but she certainly grabs the eye. She has a special teetering, tiny steps, tippy-tappy, ditzy walk that might just catch on. Or not.

Rita, married to hunky but not very advanced Eddie (Daniel Mays) and mother to two kids, isn’t naturally political, just plucky and gobby. But as the strike gathers momentum ("Right! All out!" has never been so joyously proclaimed) , she finds herself assuming leadership, egged on by mischievous, grinning shop steward Albert (lovely, lovely Bob Hoskins) and backed by her superglam sisters at the plant, all of them kitted up in a kind of Shoreditch retro-chic.

As luck would have it, her co-workers include Andrea Riseborough as good-time girl Brenda ("he said, all the workers of the world should unite, so I thought, I can help you with that one straightaway mate, so I did") and Jaime Winstone as totty Sandra, wiggling her arse in hotpants but then loyally wrecking her first ever photo-shoot, advertising Ford, by writing "equal pay" on her tum in lipstick.

Another big help to Rita is Rosamund Pike as Lisa, the patronised wife of Ford’s dorky head of industrial relations. Lisa got a First in history at Cambridge, "one of the finest universities in the world", but her husband thinks she’s only good for cooking and fetching the cheese. Lisa tells Rita that she’s always wondered what it felt like to be an extraordinary person, making history: "Let me know when you’ve finished doing it." Then she lends Rita her snazzy red Biba dress. So women can bond across the classes — who knew?

The film winds up in two set-pieces. Rita, uninvited, bravely addresses the all-male TUC congress in Eastbourne, in an emotional — one might almost say Oscar-acceptance style — speech, urging them to do the right thing, just as Britain did in the War: "You had to do something, you had to stand up." After a row, her hubby has, unknown to her, dashed up on his motorbike to be there and support her. They’re tearfully reconciled on the beach. "It’s amazing what you’ve done, Rita O’Grady", he tells her. "You was huge — like a force."

On she goes to meet Barbara Castle, played as a fantastic virago by Miranda Richardson, a thoroughly welcome reprise of her role as the deranged Queenie of Blackadder, a treat for all who, like the Irish builder Mr O’Reilly in Fawlty Towers, like a spirited woman. Her turn is well supported by a pair of comically cringing male civil servants, but not at all by a discordant and pompous impersonation of Harold Wilson by John Sessions.

Made in Dagenham is directed by Nigel Cole, whose one big hit Calendar Girls of seven years ago it more or less recapitulates. Final chorus: "you can get it if you really want it ..." It’s one big you go, girl — those words not actually appearing, but Bob Hoskins urging instead "you can do this and you should". All good fun. And anyway, it’s not true that everybody supports equal pay now. This is a film, that in a World Service sort of way, could usefully be shown to the Taliban and the Saudis and many other backward gents. Myself, I’d like to see it being played in Guantánamo Bay on a continuous loop for months at a time.

Made In Dagenham
Cert: 15

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