Made in Dagenham
Cinema Nova, 01/11/2010
Status: Behind by 7 films
While Made in Dagenham had a glossy, nostalgic, lively feel, the events are rather gritty – about 187 women who live on an estate and work in the basement of the Ford car factory sewing car seat covers. A dispute about the pay classification of the women machinists as unskilled quickly escalates into an industrial action about fairness and equal pay. It’s all very jolly and no-one really takes it terribly seriously until the plant runs out of finished car seats and production halts, putting several thousand men out of work. Then the clichéd chips are down and folks truly show their colors.
SALLY HAWKINS (Happy-Go-Lucky) plays Rita, the mousy-yet-iron-willed leader of the women machinists, and does a terrific job showing that 60s women are not all either from Bex ads on one hand or Germaine Greer on the other. The rest of the cast, including BOB HOSKINS, ROSAMUND PIKE (Pride and Prejudice, An Education), MIRANDA RICHARDSON and RICHARD SCHIFF (The West Wing) are also really solid.
Although the film is charming, it is a fairly conventional fictionalization of this type of underdog/social justice story with a feel-good twist. It’s an important story, though, and it’s told well.
